


to a strange new world

by rappaccini



Series: ut malum pluvia [3]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (Comics), The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Abuse, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Character Study, F/M, Implied Death, M/M, Preemptive Fix-It, Pseudo-Incest, Trauma, scavenging material from the comics like a vulture would a carcass
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-30
Updated: 2020-09-07
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:34:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 53,107
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26264281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rappaccini/pseuds/rappaccini
Summary: The Hargreeves siblings have returned to a different 2019 than the one they remember, one in which the Umbrella Academy never disbanded, and Vanya is imprisoned in Hotel Oblivion, the prison their father stashes the worst of their former enemies in.Seeking to reunite with her, the siblings revolt and mount a rescue mission.(Or, canon is dead and I'm a vulture. Here's a preemptive take on a future Season 3, because I expect only a letdown)
Relationships: Allison Hargreeves/Luther Hargreeves, Ben Hargreeves/Klaus Hargreeves, Number Five | The Boy/Vanya Hargreeves, The Hargreeves Family, The Hargreeves Family & Lila Pitts
Series: ut malum pluvia [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1857544
Comments: 121
Kudos: 120





	1. long time gone

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fiveyaaas](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fiveyaaas/gifts).



On the seventeenth hour of the eighteenth of April, 1955, Lila Pitts lands crouched on the balls of her feet in the rubble of what had once been the Temps Commission Main Headquarters in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains in New York.

She lands alone. 

The pressure pops at her eardrums, and nausea turns her gut so quickly within her that she has no choice but to keel over and vomit the contents of her stomach onto the cracked, charred remnants of what had once been a very nice walkway, connecting one end of the Commission’s campus to the next. Lila, having been an active field agent for the Commission since the age of eighteen, is quite used to time travel, but she’s never done it quite like this. 

Lila wipes her mouth, swallows roughly, and glances around.

There is no one here. Not Vanya Hargreeves, not her monstrous brother, not any of the rest of their pack. Not a single agent or analyst or secretary. Not even the birds are singing in the trees on the outskirts of campus. There's only the whisper of the wind as it blows a storm in from the west. 

She had leapt here brimming with terrible intent, but, realizing that the sky is a distinctly darker shade of gray than it had been a second ago, that the buildings around her are no longer burning, but twisted piles of blackened wood and stone, she can tell that something has gone horribly wrong.

In short, Lila had landed exactly where she’d intended, exactly at the hour and minute she’d intended, but three days ahead.

By now, the Hargreeves siblings have driven to their father’s house, convinced him to change the timeline, and winked away to the future. They are well beyond her reach, and being outside the range of proximity necessary for her power to latch onto theirs, she has lost any hope of leaping backwards through time to find them.

She doesn’t know this yet. She stalks the ruins for hours, flitting from one building to the next until her legs are sore from the running and climbing, and she looks for any signs of movement, from the Hargreeves siblings, or from any living personnel, someone who might be able to tell her what to do.

She finds nothing.

Lila is alone, and her only company is death.

The corpses buried and burnt in the ruins are starting to swell and to smell, and the sickly sweet stench mingles with that of scorch and curls in her nose, making her very, very happy she’d lost her lunch out on the walkway. She calls out, but the only answer she gets is her own voice, echoing back over and over and over against the brick walls, half-melted like candle wax. 

Lila runs her fingers along the inside of her arm, noting the ragged edges of her crimson nail polish and thinking dispassionately, _I’ll have to add another coat, Mother and I can make an afternoon of it, like we always do. We can sit in her office and smoke and talk about work and paint our nails together, and--_

And then she remembers again, that Mother is dead. How odd, how she keeps forgetting, in spite of herself. How she keeps looking up, expecting to see her distinctive silhouette, keeps her ears pricked for the click of her cherry-red heels. 

She pulls her clawed hand out of her arm, rubbing the pad of her thumb over the angry red crescents she’s left in her skin, and decides to focus on what she’d been trying to do earlier. She’s feeling for the reassuring ever-present bump of her tracker, which is still there. 

_How strange,_ she thinks. _There’s no one left to find me._

A part of her wants to take one of the larger shards of glass on the ground and tear into her arm, or else rake into it with her nails, to take it out of her; after all, she is her mother’s daughter, and her mother had always been certain to educate her on the importance of function over all, and if there is no one left to find her, then the tracker serves no function, and therefore ought to be rooted out and rid of. 

She doesn’t. 

Her mother always prioritized function over all. But Lila’s always been the sentimental type. She executes her kills with imagination. She paints her nails with her dead mother’s polish. She decorates her little private bunk in the agents’ dormitories with trophies taken from the places she’s been over the years: a poster for a Californian prom night in 1987, her first big mission at the ripe young age of eighteen, a poster from the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, a leaflet from Beijing in 1948… 

She keeps the tracker. It’s a little piece of home that’s always with her. It’s all hers, and no one can take it from her, not unless they claw it out of her. 

She wanders out to the obstacle course she and Mother had played on when she was little, the one where she’d been taught to tumble and dodge and climb with a merry spray of bullets chasing her. She hasn’t the energy to attempt it again, but she still climbs up the rope wall and sits on the platform, as she would when she was little and would pretend she was climbing the wall of a castle, and looks out over the devastation. 

She is alone, and she has no idea what to do. 

Lila’s always taken to mimicry, even in the foggiest corners of her memory, back when she’d lived in London, back when her parents were still alive, back before Mother had plucked her out of that bullet-ridden house and whisked her away, back before her power had been known to her. She’s always looked to others to tell her how to dress or how to walk or how to talk or how to act. 

But now her mother is dead, and her employers are dead, and her peers are dead, and her mark is out of her reach, and she doesn’t have a mission assignment anymore, and she doesn’t know what to do. And she knows exactly who is responsible for it, who is just out of her reach.

The sky opens above her, and rain slashes down, beating into her shoulders, but by the time the first drops reach her, her eyes are already wet and blurring over. 

* * *

Diego had gone right for the basement, for the false wall Luther had revealed to them that week the world ended, the one that Pogo had shown him, that concealed the elevator that led down, down, down to the cell Vanya had been kept in.

The wall is intact when he finds it, and, not one for patience, Diego opts to skip the process of searching for a hidden lever or keyhole. Instead, he draws a knife out from his belt and sweeps the shaggy strands of his hair, so very in the way of his eyeline, out of his face. And he drives his knife into the drywall, dragging it back and forth like the blade of a saw as he tears into it, looking to peel it back to see if the elevator is here at all.

This is where Five finds Diego, his face coated in a layer of fine white dust from the wall, like someone had upended a bag of sugar on his head. 

“What the hell are you--”

Diego’s peeled enough of it away, for Five to see what’s behind it, and when he does, that hot flash of annoyance in him vanishes. 

It’s an elevator. The house doesn’t _have_ an elevator.

He steps in beside his brother, and together, they tear down enough chunks of drywall to carve an opening large enough for them to fit through, to pass through to the tiny hallway on the other side, a tiny landing area for the elevator.

“What’s this?” Five asks. It looks rickety, half-liable to plummet down the shaft and shatter.

Diego swallows, and uses the process of cranking the ancient door open as an excuse to avoid looking at him. “Well, that week when the world ended, we, uh. We locked Vanya up in--”

“Allison told me.”

“Oh.” Diego reaches up, to smear white dust from his mouth. “Well, this is the way that leads to it. The cage, I mean.”

Five steps inside, peering at the dusty buttons. One leading down, one leading up, and a keypad above it with numbers so tarnished he can hardly make them out. “What are you thinking?” 

Diego slides in beside him, tugging the rusted cage behind them. It squeals in protest, but ultimately obeys him, and it’s only half-closed when he’s slamming the _down_ button. “That she might be down here.”

The elevator jerks, and shudders its way down. 

“Well, if it worked, if we saved the world, then she shouldn’t…” Five’s brow furrows, and he swallows. 

Be down here. 

She shouldn’t be down here. She should never have been down here, if what appears to have happened has happened. 

But she’s not here, so it’s worth a look. 

_Suppose she is down here,_ Diego thinks. _Suppose she’s trapped, and she starves to death because none of us bothered to even check._

It’s taken a full minute, to make their way to the bottom. 

When they do, they come upon absolute darkness, the sputtering orange light in the elevator the only source of illumination. It’s like they’ve landed in the depths of the vacuum of space. 

Diego leans over, outside the elevator, and reaches for something.

It’s a light switch. He flicks it on, and a line of sickly fluorescents crackle on, revealing the tunnel stretching down to the stomach of the house.

The cage is still there. 

It is still there, therefore it was built. Therefore, at some point in the childhood none of them can remember, their father had at least considered locking her away. Some things don’t change. 

“And this is where…” His voice seems to be tugged out of his mouth, echoing strangely in the tube of the tunnel; at the far end, it doesn’t sound like his own voice any longer, more like someone hiding in the dark is mimicking his words, parroting them back to him. 

“Yeah.”

It’s a lot worse than Five imagined it, narrow and dark and jagged, like it’s lined with teeth. He’d wondered what had triggered Vanya to break down as severely as she did, but now, looking at where she was left, he gets it. 

_“Real_ nice,” Five leers at Diego, who looks away. 

Five peers through the window, looking for any telltale figures inside. The cage is constructed in a vaguely octagonal shape, rendering its corners too shallow for a person to adequately hide in; there isn’t a single inch of the cage that he cannot see from this vantage point, which means, there is no deniability as to its emptiness. Vanya is not here.

Diego sighs quickly in relief beside him, and the sigh is carried through the tunnel, as if the house itself agrees. 

But Five isn’t quite so easy to agree. As much as he would’ve hated to find her here, they’d at least have found her. Now, they’re no closer to doing so. 

He turns on his heels, and starts back towards the elevator. He doesn’t want to spend a minute longer down here, if it can be helped, and he has a creeping, paranoid sort of suspicion that the elevator might be inclined to leave without them. 

Diego’s in step beside him, and Five, eager to fill the silence with something, to chase away the ghosts, decides to ask Diego about what he’d approached him to inquire about, what he’d forgotten when he’d realized what Diego was doing.

“That woman. In the Commission. How do you know her?”

Diego tenses. “Are you accusing me of something?”

“Not yet,” Five replies coolly. “Should I be?”

“No. Lila Pitts is some Commission agent I got mixed up with in the sixties. She was looking for Vanya, and so was I, and we broke into that FBI building to get her.”

_“Where?”_

“Oh. Right. Vanya got kidnapped by the feds. You missed a lot when you were… Where, exactly?”

“Caught up in Commission business,” Five replies flippantly, “My former employer was blackmailing me to complete a mission. He held my and Luther’s birth mother at gunpoint as collateral. Couldn’t be avoided.”

“... What?”

“Yeah. We’re twins.”

Their footsteps grow loud.

“Oh. I mean… I _guess.”_ Diego throws up his hands, and decides not to push the issue any further. Come to think of it, there’s something he needs to ask of Five. “Who was the Handler?” 

“My old boss. I set her on fire.”

“Oh. Guess that explains the revenge thing.”

But it doesn’t explain that power. For the entire elevator ride up, Diego can’t stop thinking about it, about watching his aim betray him, watching stone and plaster tear before her hands like it’d been made of paper, watching Allison’s eyes turn to glass…

Diego steps out without a word, and leaves Five behind. He needs to see about something.

Five ambles out after him, wiping chalky dust onto his too-tight shorts, and climbing the stairs, burrowing his fists into his pockets. He’s wandered the house, from top to bottom, opening every door and dumbwaiter, peering into every room, and there’s been nothing. 

_Imagine if she’d just been out on some errand,_ Five thinks, _If the her that had existed in this timeline had simply been away for school, or for work, or to go buy something. Imagine that she’s fine, and she’s simply on her way back to the mansion as we speak._

It isn’t a reassuring thought.

Five’s on the ground floor, peering through the window in the doors leading to the gymnasium, which is empty, and filled with equipment he doesn’t recognize. Maybe he’d left before it’d arrived, maybe it’d never been there at all until they’d changed the timeline. He has no way of knowing, and he hates it.

The ghost of his reflection in the glass jumps out at him again, and Five backs up, to take a better look at himself. 

He’s older again. Still too young for his liking, but if he’d had to guess, he’d slingshotted himself just over the barrier of middle-teenager sometime in the middle of their leap through time. He’s taller again, now of a height with Ben, and that probably explains the way his shorts keep riding up his ass when he walks, why his jacket feels tight around the elbows and shoulders. His feet, jammed into shoes that are now several sizes too small, ache. 

“Been drinking your milk?” comes a voice he barely recognizes, warm with teasing amusement. 

It’s Ben. 

And because it’s Ben, because Ben is alive and among them again, because they’d once been close when they were children and they might be close _again,_ Five finds himself rolling his eyes good-humoredly and turning the corner, to follow the sound of his voice. 

It’s coming from a far end of the gallery. The hallway is long and large, spanning most of the length of the house. When Five had last stood in it, it’d been mostly empty, and as a result had been an ideal location for games of indoor soccer with Allison and Ben, but now, it’s stacked floor to ceiling on both sides with expensive glass cases of Umbrella Academy merchandise he hadn’t been here to see. If he were to kick a ball in here, he’d certainly shatter something, which is quite an attractive thought.

Ben’s here, rifling though a cabinet for a box of Umbrella Academy-branded cereal, which he blows a puff of dust off the top of, tears open, and starts eating. It’s stale and utterly underwhelming, but it’s also the first thing he’s eaten in twelve years, so he's definitely going to vomit it back up even if the creatures in his gut stay silent. It’s the best thing he’s ever tasted. He’s actually tearing up.

“Here,” he says, taking a fistful of cereal and thrusting it out at Five. “Here. Take some.”

Five stares down at the warped little marshmallows, the sugar-coated rice shapes that have definitely expired years ago. 

He accepts the handout, and starts eating.

“This is terrible.”

“Oh, I know, it’s disgusting.”

They keep eating. 

As they do, Five studies the planes of Ben’s face. It’s a face he’d never gotten to see in its adult form, only in the flickering blue flash of a forever-teenager. Now, he’s of an age with everyone but Five, and his face reflects it, regrettably thin patch of facial hair included. His hair keeps feathering down into his face now, and he has to keep sweeping it out of his eyes.

And the scar, faded and pink and soft with age, but still very much _there._

Ben catches him staring at it. “So much has changed, huh?” 

They’ve landed in the present, but somehow, they’re just as out-of-place as they were in 1963. They’ve landed in a world they haven’t lived in at all. They’ve landed in a world without the Commission, Five realizes. Just the thought is enough to send Five’s mind into a hurricane of possibilities: Now, without the Commission to tune and fine-tune the universe, how much has free will reshaped the timeline? Had the Hindenburg burst? Had the Lusitania sunk? Had Gutenburg been credited with inventing the printing press in the West?

 _Well, JFK’s dead,_ Five supposes. That, at least, is certain.

They’ve landed in bodies that don’t feel quite like theirs. The sensation is one Ben likens to slipping into a pair of old shoes that you’d left in a closet for years, feeling the way they’d molded to your feet, but also how the effects of unuse had warped them. In his case, the shoes are a size bigger than he’s ever worn them, yet the imprints of his feet remain. 

In a terrible, selfish way, Five’s grateful. Now everyone else understands how it feels. 

“Where’d the original us go?” Ben asks. “The versions of us that lived these lives, that lived in these bodies, that did whatever it is that led to all of this? I mean, I don’t know about you, but I don’t remember getting this scar, or not-dying, or getting up in the morning and putting _these_ on.” He points to his schoolboy shorts, which look remarkably wrong on a twenty-nine-year-old man. “I just… I’m still me, but I know that there’s another me, the me that got this scar and stayed with the Academy, and got to grow up. And I don’t know who he is, or where he went. Because he’s not here anymore. The only person in my head is me.”

Five doesn’t answer. He just shakes his head.

He hadn’t thought of it like that. The idea that they’d come barreling in from outside of spacetime and had knocked the versions of Luther and Ben and Vanya and Klaus and Allison and Diego who’d lived these lives out of their bodies, as if they’d been possessive ghosts come to take control of their bodies… well. He hadn’t thought of it. 

_We’re all alive, but they’re something worse than dead; they’re nonexistent. And they’re like that because I..._

Enough. Five digs his teeth into the inside of his cheek, kills the thought before it can form. 

Ben turns the box in his hands, running his fingers along the cartoon versions of his family, One and Two and Three and Four and Five and Six and… Seven. 

He sighs.

“Where is she?” he asks. “Have you found her yet?”

“Nowhere in the house. She has an apartment, or, she _had_ an apartment, in the world that wasn’t. But since it seems we’ve all stayed here into adulthood--”

“You didn’t, actually,” interjects Ben. “You still left. I guess some things just happen no matter what, huh?”

Five turns away. “Well. She seems to have stayed here. Her room’s still intact. And the clothes in the dresser are adult-sized.” 

“Oh, you went digging through her clothes, huh? Looking for something in particular?” Five isn’t facing Ben, but the way the back of his neck turns pink tells Ben everything. 

He’s thinking back, to those few months before Five had gone and vanished on them. They’d been a trio then, but he could tell that something was shifting. He couldn’t put a name to it then, but he can now.

 _Some mess,_ he thinks, setting the box crookedly back into the case. Taking a passing glance at a little pewter figure of Number Four, he sighs. _Guess I can relate. I’ve made one too._

He steps to stand shoulder to shoulder with Five, staring through a dim window out to the courtyard.

There’s a bare patch in the yard, where his statue once stood.

“Whatever strange hurricane of change we’ve made,” Five is saying, “It saved you.”

“Yeah. It did.” 

“How did it happen?” Five asks quietly.

He doesn’t clarify. He doesn’t need to.

“It was a mistake. I just…” Ben’s chest tightens, and he feels his gut stir. “I don’t want to talk about it. It was a mistake.”

It’s quiet for a moment, and they can hear Luther’s heavy footfalls somewhere above them. 

Five hasn’t taken his eyes off that empty patch of grass. There’s an awful thought, stirring in him. Vanya had been a member of the Academy, but Vanya is not here anymore, and her room had been lived-in, but covered in a fine layer of dust, the same way Ben’s had been. “Do you think that Vanya…”

Ben looks at him for a while, but sighs and shakes his head. “I don’t know. I just don't know.”

* * *

Vanya is not sure exactly, of where she is, or of _when_ she is. She isn’t sure if Five had lost hold of only her, or of all of their siblings again, if they’re right back where they started, scattered hours and days and months away from each other. She’s in the present, in 2019, she thinks. 

She isn’t certain of how much had changed as a result of their meddling in the past, but there are some compelling clues. 

For one, _this_ Vanya’s ears are pierced. She rolls an earlobe between her fingers, staring at her reflection in the dingy little mirror by the door, at the little puncture in it. A tiny change, but it makes her wonder what this version of her was like, what sort of hurricanes had been set off by the butterfly-flap of their interference with the past. 

But far more importantly, her hair is different. 

Vanya’s head had felt strangely lighter when she’d woken, but she’d attributed it to dizziness, to the nausea of time travel that’s only just sort of left her now. But then, she’d peered in the mirror, and realized how much had changed; her hair is no longer long and silver-white, but brown again, and falling no further than her chin. She keeps running her fingers through it, expecting there to be more of it. 

Vanya’s in front of the mirror again, staring at it, threading her fingers through the strands, which are greasy and unwashed. The last time it’d been this short had been when she’d gone to college; Vanya had decided to do away with it all, as a sort of gesture of rebellion, and had opted to cut her hair herself in the dormitory's hall bathroom. She’d regretted it immediately, spending the rest of her first semester with her head crammed into a series of dull knit hats, and her hair had grown long ever since. 

And the color… Had she not lost control of her power so completely, in this world they’ve created? Had she not caused the apocalypse at all? Had they _done_ it?

The tattoo on her arm seems to point to yes. 

When Vanya was a girl, she’d been denied the brand that each and every one of her siblings had administered to them a month before they were due to make their debut saving the City Bank; she’d even lovingly traced it her arm in permanent marker, then covered in shame in case someone saw. 

It’s here now, and what it implies both thrills and terrifies her. 

In this world, she is a member of the Umbrella Academy. Which means in this world, her powers hadn’t been buried under a mountain of secrets.

Which doesn’t explain her situation now. 

Vanya knows only so much about her siblings’ activities; she’d always been kept to the side, in the dark, out of the way. She’d been disinvited from Academy meetings, had been forgotten more often than not for family ones, had been locked in her room during mission outings. 

But she knows about Hotel Oblivion.

It’s a sort of unspeakable secret that her siblings had hissed back and forth when they were teenagers, passing like a possessive spirit between their lips and ears, something meant only for Luther that he'd shared with the rest of them, so though Vanya knows next to nothing about it, she knows about it at all, and she holds that point with a particular amount of pride. 

She knows what it is, and she knows that she must’ve done something awful, to be placed here. 

_Or... are we all here? Are we all here, in different rooms?_

Vanya paces around her little room, as she’s done for hours upon hours. She’s gone over every inch of the place a dozen times already. 

She doesn’t bother with the window. It’s boarded up stiffly, and she can’t pry anything loose. 

Her bed is stiff, and creaks under her when she lies on it, an unnaturally loud silence that makes her wince apologetically. 

The desk is bare, but for the brochure, and the chair creaks in protest when she sits in it. 

The light switch works. She flicks it off, on, off, on, off, on. 

The television in the corner is on, so Vanya pauses to watch. It’s played the same cartoon in grayscale over and over for hours, a perfectly innocuous image of two identical little characters meeting, shrieking in shock, and turning to ash. Vanya doesn’t know if her fear is based in some preternatural understanding of the place, or if she’s just being paranoid, but she gets the sense that the little characters are staring out at her from within the television, and that they’re watching her.

She switches the television off.

On her bedside table, the little alarm clock is broken, and the phone doesn’t even have a dial tone when she tries it again. And inside the drawer is a thin yellow hardcover shell of a book that's had its pages all torn out in a fury.

Vanya runs her fingertips along the rough edges of where the pages had been torn out, then closes it and reads the cover once more: _Be A Better You: Your Life in the Hotel Oblivion by Sir Reginald Hargreeves._

She gets why other-her ripped it up. Still, she wishes she could’ve read it, if only to have something to do. The most she’s accomplished since she woke up was staring at the mirror, tugging on the white pajamas she’d found crumpled on the floor, and using the toilet in the tiny, closet-sized bathroom attached to her suite, if one could be generous enough to call it that. 

Now that she’s gone over everything with a fine-tooth comb, there’s nothing to keep her attention from the door.

It’s a perfectly ordinary-looking door. Tall, rectangular, sturdy-looking, newly-painted. It has a little peephole in the middle she keeps darting up to peek through, with her legs splayed so her feet won’t show under the doorway.

But something about it worries her, making the hair on the back of her neck stand on end. There’s a weight to it, a gravity that pulls her towards it, yet repels her, a strange sensation that there is someone on the other side of that door, someone who wants to hurt her, someone who will know when she is close enough to it and will then burst through and…

And she’s being stupid.

Vanya walks right up and peeks through, before her nerve can abandon her.

The fish-eye view of the hallway doesn’t betray anything insidious. The greenish light makes her eyes strain, like she’s underwater and trying to glimpse something far away, but there’s nothing outright frightening; no gore, no corpses, no strange man standing in the middle of the hall, staring into her peephole and grinning to reveal far too many teeth. Just a line of identical-looking doors, with no numbers on them to identify them by; it seems like they’d been pried off by something, like a crowbar, or a claw. It’s a small thing, a thing that can be easily explained away or overlooked, and Vanya tries very hard to explain it away and overlook it.

But Vanya doesn’t understand why her heart’s slamming in her chest. 

She’d opened the door once, to shove the empty room service tray out onto the floor, and she’d watched for hours, waiting for someone to walk by and take it. But no one had. 

Vanya sucks in a deep breath, and opens the door, to…

It’s gone. The tray’s gone. 

Vanya stares at the indentation in the flat off-white carpet where it had been, reaching out with a tentative socked toe to poke at the space, then to flatten her foot and take one small step into a larger world.

It’s cold, in the hallway, and she tugs her sleeves down around her hands, balling the fabric up in her fists. She walks along the plush green rug rolled down the center of the hall, and lays her eyes on what’s at the end of it.

A window, large, nearly floor-to-ceiling, masked by only a pale blue curtain.

_If only I can reach it, if only I can pull it back, then I can see where I am and I can then..._

She takes a step, and another, and another. She must be as quiet as possible, for it is unnaturally silent here, so quiet that even drugged as she is, she is keenly aware of every sound, and every lack of sound; it's so quiet she can’t hear a single thing outside the hotel itself, not a bird, nor a car, nor the creaking of night insects. So quiet she can hear her blood slushing in her ears, and…

Movement, from behind some of the doors.

She isn’t alone. A door is ajar, a few rooms ahead of her. 

Vanya’s voice is cowering in her chest, so she creeps forward, leans in to peer into that absolute darkness that she has found is not exclusive to her own room when she switches the lights off. 

She is close enough to reach out and touch the doorknob, when she sees the scaly face staring back at her, something not quite fish, not quite reptile, but both and neither. Something with green catlike eyes, slitted pupils that sharpen at the sight of her. Something hunched low, as if in a hunter’s crouch. 

For a second, they watch each other in the way that apex predators do, warily determining if the other is hungry enough to threaten them.

Then, a hissed phrase Vanya cannot decipher, the rattling of the doorknob as he reaches for it.

Vanya turns tail, and sprints back to her own room, slamming the door shut.

She shoves her desk, and then the bedside table, and then the chair against the door. She switches off the lights, crawls over and behind the bed to huddle in the corner of the room, and stares at the bar of light under the door, watching blots of shadow flicker across it, as someone or something comes to a stop in front of her room. 

She's drawing in quick, sharp breaths, reaching up with a trembling hand to tug the scratchy bedsheets down to cover her. 

There's a soft clanging, metal clashing against metal, and then the shadow retreats.

The shadow, Vanya fears, must be one of the hotel's inhabitants, one of the monsters her father had tossed here to forget about.

Vanya can't see her tattoo in the dark of the room, but she runs her fingers along where it's inked into her skin, wondering. By virtue of her being here, she has been labeled as one such monster. She, who had been a member of the Academy, who must have been raised with her siblings, who must have fought with them, had still incurred her father's wrath. "What _ha_ _ppened?"_ she whispers, and there's no one to answer her.

* * *

Klaus makes the final snip to his hair, doing away with the straightened sweep of bangs he’d had hanging over one eye, that kept tickling at it. He runs his fingers through his hair, mussing it. 

There. He looks a little more like himself.

He tosses the scissors onto his desk, and starts digging through his closet. He really hates these damn shorts, and if there’s anything at all he can use as an alternative, he’ll take it.

But there’s nothing. There are just uniforms upon uniforms upon uniforms. They’re bluer than he remembers, and there’s one, all the way back at the bottom of the mountain of clothing in his closet, that’s completely different, not red and blue plaid, but heavy black and white checks. Klaus remembers their father’s experimental phase, when he’d realized that the children’s uniforms would be a very important merchandising opportunity. He wonders what might’ve changed here that persuaded him to change the uniform color. 

_Shame,_ he thinks, _I actually kind of like the black one. Of course the crusty old fuck didn’t pick that._

He recognizes the graceful, feline gait of Allison, gliding into the room unannounced. 

“Hey,” he says.

“Hey,” she replies. Something’s clattering, and Klaus turns, curious. 

“You can have all my makeup,” Allison says, dropping an armful of miscellaneous beauty products in a clattering shower onto his dresser. “It’s all too dark and heavy for me. I hate all these brands.”

“Oh.” Klaus examines it. Lots of lipsticks, which he doesn’t use, but the eyeliners… no, they’re not the kind he likes. _God,_ other-Allison has awful taste. Privately, he decides he’s going to dump them in some unused corner of the house, or he’ll draw on his upsettingly bare walls with them. “Uh. Thanks?” 

Allison’s sitting on his bed, bringing a hand up to her throat, massaging it gently with a troubled look hanging over her face like a stormcloud. 

He notices her fingernails, and glances down at his own. They’ve been painted the same color. Klaus waves his fingers at her. “Think we did ‘em together?”

He hopes so. It’s reassuring to think that of all these things have changed, one of their old rituals from when they were teenagers would’ve stayed. He chooses to believe it. 

“I have no clue,” Allison says quietly, staring down at her hands. This is the first time she’s really noticed them, that her nails are short and painted black. That her right hand is mottled with scarring, and seems strangely crooked, like the fingers had been broken and healed a little out of shape. Even now, she can’t bend them as well as she can those on her left hand. 

_I lost one scar, and gained another,_ she thinks. _What could have caused this?_

“Even the polish?” he’s asking, and Allison glances down at the pile of junk she’d unloaded onto his already junk-heavy dresser.

“Yeah. I hate those colors.” She stares down at her nails in disdain.

“What?”

“I’ve _got_ to take this off.” 

“Not a fan?”

“Absolutely not.”

Klaus glances down at his own hands. “Well, what’s wrong with the color black?”

“Nothing’s wrong with the color black,” Allison says, in the exact tone of voice that implies that there is something wrong with the color black.

“Then what’s the issue?”

“I’m not an emo little fifteen-year-old, Klaus.”

“And I am?” He cocks his head.

Allison raises an eyebrow at him.

“Point taken.” He flops onto his bed, beside her, to look at what she’s looking at. They’re probably staring up at the same crack in the ceiling. He doesn’t recognize it; the ones he remembers didn’t arc like a lightning bolt across the ceiling. “This is all _so_ weird.”

Allison hums in agreement. She’d just come from digging through the magazine articles in the archive room. Dad had saved a clipping of every single magazine, journal, and newspaper that had covered them, and while once she’d thought it quite persnickety of him, she’s now a little grateful, especially that this other version of Dad had done the same. 

Allison had gone there in search of answers, in search of how and when Vanya had become a member of the team, but she’d only made it up until 2007 before she’d gotten too angry to keep reading. She’d been faced with a deluge of articles comparing Seven and Three, comparing Vanya and her. 

It’s something she’d been afraid of for a very long time, back when she was a teenager and back when being adored had been the most important thing in the world to her; she’d always had a creeping suspicion that if Vanya had been special, if she’d had a power, if she’d been a part of the Academy like her, if Allison didn’t have the satisfaction of being the only girl in the Academy, that everyone would have loved her so much more. 

And, well. They did. 

It makes her wonder about how she and this other Vanya might’ve gotten along. If the frostiness she and her own Vanya had engaged in for so many years, that they’ve only _just_ thawed over, might’ve crossed the line into outright hostility. 

And if this other Allison, this Allison who’d never left home, who’d stayed with the Academy, who dyes her hair purple and wears dark, moody makeup, had cared so deeply about all the things Allison cared about before her divorce, well. She knows how she would’ve felt about Vanya. 

She would have hated her. 

Allison gets up, and hurries out of Klaus’s room. She wants to get to looking at those files again, now that her anger’s cooled. She wants to know what happened. 

Klaus trails after her at first, noting the vaguely reptilian look the braids have given to the back of her head, before he comes to a halt. 

Vanya’s room is still here, isn’t it? 

He’d been vaguely aware, of course, that his own bedroom had been much smaller than he’d last left it, but seeing her door, slightly ajar, has his curiosity pricked. In this world, where they all stayed, Vanya had stayed too. She’d never been sent off to board at some fancy East Coast school for girls when they were fourteen, and he hadn’t taken a sledgehammer to the wall that separated their bedrooms, hadn’t dragged her furniture out and torn down her posters and threw everything she hadn’t packed and taken with her on the side of the curb. 

His cheeks are burning, thinking about it now. 

He swings the door open, wondering if that old poster of Rudolf Koelman is on the inside of the door. He’d been a crush of hers, Klaus recalls with a smirk, remembering how he’d become acutely aware of how, with the door closed, her bed has a perfect view of the poster, how those mysterious noises he’d heard on his Vanya-facing wall in the dead of night became a lot less mysterious. 

He steps into her room with a smile on his face, the beginnings of a joke about her taste in old men forming…

But then it dies.

Ben’s here. 

He’s sitting on her narrow bed, with her violin case in his lap. It’s open, and the instrument is inside, the wood bleached a ghostly shade of white. Ben’s so engrossed in staring at it, his face twisted in thought, that he doesn’t hear Klaus come in.

“Hey,” he says, and he watches Ben’s shoulders straighten sharply. He claps the case shut, like he's embarrassed to have been seen looking at it. 

_Okay,_ he thinks. _We’re still not doing great. Hard feelings still hard._

Well, maybe if he makes him laugh. Ben likes it, when he makes him laugh; he's good at that. “Sure is weird, being back,” Klaus says, taking his first few steps into the room. “Gotta say, we were only in the past for, what? Two weeks, tops? Feels like years, though. You think our cult’s doing alright?” 

The rain, drumming on the walls and windows a hallway away, suddenly becomes very loud. 

And Klaus’s words die in his mouth. He thinks back, to that fight of theirs, decades ago, and days ago. He thinks about what was said. What wasn’t said.

Klaus moves to sit beside Ben, but the second the mattress caves, Ben’s up, and he’s out of the door, slamming it behind him. The ancient, faded poster of Koelmann flops half- loose, hanging like a ghost. 

Klaus stares at the door for a while, his heart turning over and over.

 _Yeah,_ he thinks. _I know. I fucked up._

* * *

From Allison’s vantage point in her attic, the skyline of the city is different. The same number of skyscrapers seem to be here, but they’re in different places, rising like tombstones to edge out the sky. The green eye of the CTV building, for instance, shouldn’t be looking at her at all, not from this window, but it is.

Allison glares at it, and pulls the window closed. The rain blurs the green shine of the sign, making the eye blink at her.

Even her view isn’t _hers_ anymore, and the thought makes her eyes burn.

She makes her way through the house. The layout of the mansion is the same; the same block of buildings had been bought and spliced together, but from what Allison’s read, at different times, in a different order. The decor is mostly the same, but the contents of so many of the rooms are different.

Namely, the children’s rooms. 

Allison’s bedroom, the way she’d remembered it, had been plastered with her own headshots, with posters from the films she’d convinced her father to let her star in during downtime between missions. 

Here, in this world she doesn’t know, her walls are still pink, but they’re bare. 

Her wardrobe is filled to the brim with sweater vests, skirts, button-up shirts, all Academy uniforms, and none of the skirts and jeans and dresses and bright, colorful shirts she’d been allowed to wear around the house in the years before the Academy had broken up.

Even now, Allison’s a twenty-nine-year-old woman, dressed like a schoolgirl, and she’d hated the look of the uniform so much that even her mission uniform had been preferable, so she’d pulled it on instead. And even then, it’d been an alienating experience; it’s fitted to the curves of her body, a body that she doesn’t know, that hasn’t shared the same aches and pains as her. 

It distresses her for more than an aesthetic reason; it’s the principle of the thing. Towards the end, their father had been reasoned with, had been willing to allow them the small freedoms of dressing as they pleased and reading books Pogo would buy for them and other tiny treats they’d all clung to.

Here, in this world, those freedoms had not been provided. 

Here, Allison had never been allowed to indulge her childhood dreams of being an actress, as a means of ensuring her compliance. 

In all the archives, there were no mentions of Allison Hargreeves, the actress. There were no mentions of her guest starring in teen films, the way she’d started her career before the family had splintered. There are no mentions of co-starring with Sandra Bullock, of playing an inspiring teacher-turned-bank-robber, or of playing a good-natured overworked marketing executive who needed to be taught how to date by a handsome male escort with a heart of gold.

Or even, of Allison Hargreeves, the singer; Allison’s talents stem from her voice in more than one way, and singing had been one of them. She’d even been attached to a movie musical for a while, before she’d dropped out, and she'd entertained recording a demo instead of a screen test when she'd first landed in Hollywood; singing is _hers,_ you see. It’s something that’s all hers, something she’d learned she could do completely apart from Dad and the Academy, a secret that she loves dearly; such secrets, as the Hargreeves were taught, are to be hidden from all, lest someone finds out, and uses it against you.

Allison Hargreeves had never gone to Hollywood. She’d never climbed on that shiny white Perseus plane and flown halfway across the country, had never packed her belongings into a hot pink suitcase before dawn, had never taken the locket around her neck off at all.

She knows what that means. She knew what it meant as soon as she slipped the mission uniform on and noted her silhouette missing some of the fullness it had only gained after... 

_No,_ she thinks firmly. _Enough._

She charges up the stairs, to the computer room, finds the old machine in the same place it’d been before, but even this is different too; the machine is slightly less boxlike, the screen far bigger, the keys flatter. Allison stumbles her way through figuring out how to boot it up, through waiting for the dial-up to hit. 

Finally, after an eternity of listening to a shrill noise that makes her contemplate tossing the monitor out the third-floor window, Allison is able to get to searching for Patrick’s name. 

She types it in, drumming her nails into the desk. 

And gets a hit.

Patrick is still famous, in this world. He’s still an actor in those bland action movies she could honestly care less about, still handsome. He still has the same haircut. 

But he isn’t divorced. He isn’t married, he’s never been married.

He doesn’t have a child. 

_She_ doesn’t have a child. 

Allison claps a hand over her mouth, pressing her free hand tightly over her abdomen. 

**“I heard a rumor that Claire was here.”**

She says it quickly, automatically, and she looks around, wildly, expecting her girl to pop into being on the desk, her skinny little legs dangling. Or on her lap, or sitting on the floor, or peeking her head through the doorway.

But she doesn’t.

So Allison says it again. And again. And again.

It doesn’t work.

* * *

Luther’s held off on taking off the sweats he’d found himself working out in as long as he can. There’s a hope, fluttering in his chest like a flag in the wind; the shape of his body is still oversized, but _maybe…_

He takes the shirt off at once, holding his breath.

And for a split second, he feels his heart soar, because he doesn’t see any patchy brown fur, because his body is _hairless--_

\--No. No, it isn’t, he realizes; it’s shaved. It’s still twisted and overly muscled and mottled where the burn scarring hadn’t healed down properly, and his chest and sides are covered in reddish smears; scratch marks, wounds he recognizes, wounds he’d given to himself, in a different way, in a different world. None of the scars are as deep as the ones he’d had before, but they’re still there, buried in another layer of raw gouge marks. 

He stares at himself, for far longer than he probably should.

He lets it all sink in.

The accident would’ve happened anyway. It would’ve…

Luther punches the mirror, and it shatters like a thin pane of glass. The shards rattle to the ground, rolling like rain off his arm, without so much as grazing it. 

He turns away from the mirror, and doesn’t look at it again, just putting on the uniform that seems to be the only thing in his closet. He does what he came here to do, changing because he has to change, because it’s important to look good in front of Dad, because clothes make a man, and he’s always cared so much about how they appear.

He hurries out the door, and down one hall, then another, then another, to Dad’s study.

Diego’s there, and the sound of his voice makes Luther stop dead in his tracks. He hovers outside the door. 

“--any chance that… that… that there were other kids like us?”

 _Oh,_ Luther recalls: _That woman. The one we fought. The one with the powers._

“No,” replies their father, who pauses shoving papers into his briefcase. “There were only the seven of you.”

“But are you _sure?”_

Dad turns slowly, to eye Diego critically through his monocle. He seems to choose his next words very carefully, drawing them out in a low growl. _“What brought this on?”_

Diego swallows quickly, and finds the words lodged in his throat. “I, uh. I…”

Luther chooses then to walk in.

Dad shifts his gaze to him, and Diego practically leaps at the chance to leap out of the conversation. He’s out of the room so quickly, he may as well have left skid marks in the Persian rug. 

“Number One?”

“I have to talk to you,” Luther says urgently. “Right now.” 

Dad raises a gray eyebrow. “Make this quick, Number One, I’ll have you know Pogo’s taking me to the airport for my flight in a matter of minutes.”

“You’re leaving?”

“Yes. For my meeting with Calhoun and Kissinger, I told you and your siblings at dinner yesterday.”

Dad’s already walking out the door, briefcase in hand, and Luther’s trailing after him like a puppy. As he follows Dad down the grand staircase, the urge hits him, hot and quick as a lightning strike, to give him a _push._

He swallows it. He has to stay focused, to stay objective, to ask what he’d come to ask him about. 

“Where’s Vanya?”

Dad frowns. “You of all people ought to know, Number One, that speaking that name in this house is against the rules.”

“Yeah. Great, whatever. Where _is_ she?”

“Your siblings have been behaving absurdly since Number Five’s return,” he says, tugging his coat on, “Ordinarily, I’d chalk it up to their own idiocy, but seeing as it seems to be contagious and you’ve caught it, perhaps your own poor leadership is to blame.”

 _“Excuse_ me?”

“Really, Number One, it’s almost shocking. I’ve told you already, a hundred times. I followed your parameters, the ones your future self set out for me. I maintained training the girl, much as a drain as she turned out to be. I made especially certain to ensure she be included among the lot of you, and that she be made as manageable as possible. But for all your talk, and for all of my own considerable effort, she was still just a bad apple.”

“What do you mean?”

“For all that was done, she still proved herself to be a grave and imminent danger. A failure, not on my own part, but on _yours.”_ Somehow, even though Dad’s shorter than him, he’s towering over Luther, “You may have saved the world, Number One, but your instructions assured me she would be brought to heel, which she most assuredly was not.” 

Luther gets it. 

“She tried to destroy the world.” 

Dad examines him coldly through the gold rim of his monocle. “Yes. And now I’m to travel down to explain to some very angry people as to why the lot of you ought to be allowed to maintain your current freedoms and continue to operate in the field. I will win this battle, of course-- I have far too much money to be beholden to things like legislation-- but this trip will be an annoyance, to say the least. And I have you to thank.” 

A part of Luther is crying out, to take Dad’s hand and beg him to tell him what he’d done wrong, to reassure him that things will only be fine if he adheres to the guidelines he’d set out for them all. 

He ignores it, stifling it. 

Dad had known. He’d known what was going to happen, and he’d still done it. _Everything has changed, and nothing has changed, and it’s my fault, because it was my plan. It’s my fault and..._

“Dad,” Luther says, _“Where is she?”_

“On a trip.”

“To where?” Luther demands, though something deep in his subconscious knows already exactly where.

“To where all mistakes worth forgetting about go,” he replies, picking up his suitcase and tugging open the door. “So, I will expect that you take this brief sabbatical to consider very carefully your failures, and kindly _forget_ about her. And when I return, we will have words about it.”

The door slams in his face.

Luther stares at it for a moment, then turns, and heads back to his father’s office.

Dad had locked the door behind him, so Luther simply removes it from its hinges, before he charges right in and begins rifling through his files, the ones of all the Academy’s missions. The special ones are flagged, with a little red dot in the corner of the file, like Teviso or Dr. Zoo or Obscura, or Valax Valax and the Oblique, the special criminals that they’d fought, the ones that weren’t just bank robbers or mad bombers, the ones that couldn’t be tossed into San Marcos so easily. 

Vanya is one such criminal, it seems.

He finds her in November of 2018, a mugshot that knocks the breath from his lungs, atop a thin, terse file. There’s no record of an arrest or a trial. Just a brief description in his father’s scrawling hand.

`On the fifth of November, 2018, Number Seven attempted to cause the apocalypse at the Icarus Theatre. The Umbrella Academy successfully subdued her, and she was checked into Hotel Oblivion for rehabilitation. `

Luther tenses.

Dad had told him, when he was sixteen, about where some of his business trips took him, the ones where he’d be gone for hours or days and then materialized back in the house without explanation. He’d leaned in, when Luther had asked him where their criminals went, and explained to him that they’d outgrown a need for police, that there was no need for such a messy trial. That they were going _on a trip_ to Hotel Oblivion. 

“That’s not justice,” Luther had murmured.

“No,” his father had answered, “It’s progress.”

Luther stares at the mugshot, at Vanya, thinner and sharper, with deeper bags under the eyes. Her hair is short and punkish and pixielike. She looks underfed and grave and gray-white and so, so angry.

 _It still happened,_ he thinks. _It all still happened. The Academy still happened, and I still got hurt, and Five still left, and you still destroyed the world._

He knows now, who the common cause of it all is. 

It’s Dad, isn’t it?

It’s Dad, and he’s so _stupid._ Dad isn't a good man, and he can't even be _reasoned_ with. He knew the apocalypse was coming, knew everything that it had taken to avoid it, and he couldn't resist inviting it in for dinner, because his ego had been larger than the world, large enough to ignore every sign of disaster, because he believed he could simply handle it his own way. 

Luther’s fist lashes out before he can stop it, turning his father’s fine oak desk to splinters. Then, upon seeing the damage he’s caused, he does it again. And again. And again. And he doesn’t stop until his eyes stop blurring. Until he looks over, at the blueprints buried in the depths of his father's desk, and tugs them out, and reads the schematics for himself. Until he’s realized exactly what he’s going to have to do.

* * *

Sir Reginald Hargreeves had made a study of animal training in the 1970s on an eight-month intensive in Botswana, and what he had learned was invaluable: if one does it well enough, the beasts will do it to themselves, shrinking and shrinking to fit into the little cages built for them, not even caring at all if the door is left unlocked, or even open. They won't be revolting beasts, but domestic ones.

He’d stopped recording the children as they reached their late teens, after all. There’d been no need to. By that point, he’d known that those who hadn’t fled into the future wouldn’t leave at all. They were training themselves, by then; not revolting children, but domestic ones.

The pack of children he’d kept an incredibly tight leash on were, by and large, far from the glowing examples of revolting children he’d come across that one spring evening in 1955, and, being so wildly different from those children, Reginald therefore considered them to be, by and large, a success. 

Though he’d lost one at thirteen to a tragic case of time-travel, he supposed that it was just the price one had to pay, for the rest turning out so well. He credits himself for this, of course, for denying them any free time, and clothes of their own at all, and names until they’d turned eighteen. He’d made damn sure there would be no chance that they’d turn to failures. 

One, of course, still did. But she’s well in hand now, out of sight and out of mind, vacationing in perpetuity at the Lake of Forgetfulness. Useless to him now, but neutralized, and proof that his experiment is a resounding success. 

However, the children he’d woken up to this morning are not the children he’d fallen asleep to. They have changed, in a way that he cannot comprehend, been possessed by the spectres of their former selves, from a timeline that’d been erased from existence, but for their consciousnesses, safe in the time-between-time and therefore free from being whipped into different forms by the winds of change that had blown over the timeline, courtesy of their light supper with their father.

And because he’d disabled the cameras, he has no way of knowing about what his children are doing right now.

He has no way of knowing that they are gathered in the kitchen, one minute after midnight, long after they are meant to be asleep.

He has no way of knowing that Five and Klaus are slurping coffee, that Allison is checking the mirror to see how bleary her face has gone from the crying she’s done, that Diego and Ben are sitting on the counter and staring at Grace, who is cheerily baking a batch of cookies for her children, as she always does when they are distressed, which they clearly seem to be, according to her scanners. 

“I just can’t believe she was a real person,” Diego’s saying, around a spoonful of cookie dough.

The more he thinks about it, the more insidious it gets; Grace had been real, once. She'd been a real woman, a smart woman, a woman with a career in the _fifties_ and a personality all her own. And their father had loved her, but he had decided to create a version of her that was sweet and placid and incapable of leaving the house without him. Thinking about it makes Diego want to break a window, and it makes Allison, who is eavesdropping on the conversation, want to throw herself off a roof. 

“I can’t believe Dad used to…” Ben can’t make himself say it. “You don’t think he still _does,_ do you?”

Five, upon overhearing their conversation, adds scotch to his coffee and decides to think about anything but that.

They stare at Grace for a long while, and mercifully, then comes Luther, bursting in the door, a mess of pages in his hands. 

“I found her,” Luther’s saying, and the scattered conversation in the kitchen stops immediately.

And then explodes again.

“Really?”

“Where?”

_“You?”_

“Well, spit it out--”

Luther dumps the contents of his arms out onto the counter, and the siblings fall in like a pack of hyenas to start picking at them. 

“Vanya tried to cause the apocalypse.”

“Yes, we know that Luther,” drawls Klaus, around a mouthful of cookie dough, “Honestly, it’s water under the bridge, you’ve gotta--”

“--No,” Luther holds up the mission report. “She tried to do it here too.”

"Oh, God, not again," groans Ben. 

“But we fixed it,” says Diego. "Everything's fine now, isn't it?" 

“Yeah, well. We fixed some things.” Luther glances at Five. “But it still happened. She tried to destroy the world, and we stopped her. And Dad took her to Hotel Oblivion.” 

It’s very quiet in the kitchen for a moment. 

“What’s that?” asks Five. 

“You don’t… oh. Right. It was after your time.” Luther, in spite of the severity of the situation, is secretly a little pleased that for once, he knows something that Five doesn’t. 

“It’s where Dad sends all our worst enemies,” Diego replies. “The really weird ones.” 

“Oh,” Ben says, staring at her mugshot. “So her hair’s different _too.”_

“Ben,” Allison snaps, “Focus.”

“Yeah. Sorry. Pass the dough bowl.” 

“So,” Five says, “Where is it?”

“We don’t know,” Luther explains. “Dad never told me. It’s by some lake, I think.”

“The Lake of Forgetfulness,” says Klaus. “Snazzy title. Kind of a mouthful though.” 

“Well, how do we get there, if we don’t know where it is?”

“That’s the thing.” Luther unrolls the blueprint he’s been holding in his armpit. “We use this. This thing Dad invented, called the televator.”

Allison spreads the page wider, frowning at the sketch. “I thought he gave up on that invention.”

“He did. Or, rather, he just gave up on selling them. He made a working prototype, and it’s right here, in the house.”

“You’re kidding,” Klaus breathes.

“We’ve used it before, and we didn’t even know it.” 

“The elevator,” Diego realizes. “The one in the basement, the one that leads down to the cage.”

“That’s it,” Luther says, “And if we use it, if we punch in this code, right here,” He taps a grayish finger on the page, “Then we’ll get there.” 

“Hang on,” Klaus says, wringing his hands. “Everyone Dad sends to Hotel Oblivion doesn’t come back. And all our enemies are there. All the _worst_ ones. And since we’ve been a team longer, we’ll certainly have more of them to deal with. Are we _sure_ we’ll be going there, knowing all that?”

Even after he says it, he knows his answer, and it’s in common with each and every one of their siblings; of _course_ they will. Their sister is there. 

“When do we go?” Five asks. 

“As soon as we can,” Luther says. “Before Dad comes back.” 

“Ten minutes,” decides Allison, “Everyone get ready, and we meet in the basement.” 

They get moving. There isn't a single mission they've ever gone on that they've moved faster for. 

Throughout their hurried departure, the cameras mounted throughout the mission see nothing. The cameras in Grace’s eyes do, but by the time Reginald thinks to check them, it will have been too late; his children, for all his best efforts, have begun revolting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm going ahead with this series, so I may as well lay it out: This was a contingency plan I laid out in case TUA shat the bed, and, seeing how things went, I feel pretty comfortable with seeing it through. The entire thing is plotted, and ready to write, which I am in the process of doing.
> 
> The series consists of seven works, of which, at the time of this authors' note, two are done, the third is in progress, and four are planned. Each work decreases in chapter size from the one before it, so the final work is really more of an epilogue. At any rate, including this chapter, we're at the halfway point. Kind of fitting that this is where I'm basically abandoning all canon, and totally accidental on my part.
> 
> In this fic I'll be borrowing heavily from the Hotel Oblivion arc of the comics, but only insofar as the Hotel itself is concerned. Past this point, apart from the Sparrows' existence (which I'll be taking major liberties with, seeing as we have basically nothing other than what they look like in comics-canon to work with), I'll be largely on my own, so the series will become even more self-indulgent.


	2. into the dead of night

The Hargreeves siblings pack into the televator, elbow to elbow, shoulder to shoulder, chest to back, and it groans under their combined weight, but it does not break. All have changed into their mission uniforms, wincing at how they molded so precisely to bodies they’re all only getting used to. None are wearing their masks.

Five in particular tugs irritably at his sleeve; having nothing to change into, Klaus has lent him one of his old uniforms, being that they’re of similar height and build, but it still sags around the wrists and ankles. Which, he supposes, is a welcome enough change from being too big for his shorts. He stares resentfully at the black material, at the umbrella emblazoned over his heart, in bright shoot-right-here-please white. He’s glad he left before Dad came up with this design for their missions. 

As Luther punches in the code, all is quiet, but for the squelching sound of the cookie dough bowl, which Ben has brought for personal use. Being newly-alive again, the novelty of having a stomach that works hasn’t worn off on him, and he’s determined to put their robotic mother’s labors to good use. And, having emptied his stomach earlier this evening, courtesy of his power-indused nausea, he needs to refill it. 

Then, they’re off.

With a gut-clenching _lurch,_ the televator begins to ascend, shuddering as it does, in a way that makes the siblings’ teeth rattle in their sockets, and makes them all freeze up, as though being utterly statuesque will protect them from flying through the rusted cage and into the void.

The only thing keeping them inside the televator is that brittle, rusted cage, which hides none of the darkness they’re hurtling through; it’s black, blacker than black, and then, there are the thin streaks of stars, flurrying through it. 

And then, a flash of greenish light, and the televator _lurches_ once more to a halt, sending the siblings stumbling into one another, squawking in protest and jostling furiously, until Luther’s gotten the door to creak open, and they can all stumble out.

Once the last of them has made landfall, all six realize where they are.

And all six are overcome with a nameless, surging dread.

They stare around them, at the purple-gray walls, at the floors so glossy they can make out their ghostlike reflections in them, at enormous gold-trimmed black velvet rugs, at the high, vaulted ceilings lined with a series of enormous chandeliers shaped in a way that reminds one of the abdomen of an exotic jungle insect. They cast greenish, sickly light down onto the siblings, the kind of light that eats at one’s brain and makes them feel the sudden urge to lie down and nap, if only to ease the fatigue the glare had stirred in them.

There is no one in the lobby. 

Behind them, the elevator _pings_ pleasantly.

They have arrived. 

“Uh… Nice place,” mutters Klaus, staring around skittishly. The Hotel Oblivion is the home of their strangest and most violent foes, and having been a team for far longer in this world, they are certain to have amassed more of them. 

At the end of the hall to their left, there’s a clatter of footfalls, fading fast. Someone knows they’re here.

“Let’s split up,” Diego says, purely on reflex.

“No,” replies every one of his siblings, not in unison, but in a babble of noise. 

Another _ping._

They turn as one, and find a blank wall where the televator had once been.

There is no front door. Not even a set of windows, in the front lobby.

“We’re trapped here,” Five mutters. 

“No,” insists Luther, “Dad came here all the time before, and he probably still does. So there’s got to be a way to call the elevator back. We just need to find it.”

“Where would that even _be?”_ Klaus wonders, peering uneasily at the wall, reaching out to brush a fingertip against it, as though it might crumble to dust under his touch. 

“I don’t know, some control room?” suggests Diego. “Is there a map to this place? Go look at those brochures.”

Klaus stares at the side table’s offerings: _Fun Facts About The Lake Of Forgetfulness, Remember, You’re Never Leaving!, Suicidal Thoughts? Why Not!_

“They’re useless.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I’m not, see?”

“Well, shit,” Diego runs his hand over his scruff, wondering how on earth other-Diego could stand the itchiness of it, “How the hell are we going to find our way around?” 

As they discuss their future escape, and add that to their mission agenda, Ben’s forged ahead. He has noticed the front desk, at the far end of the hobby, painted a sickly shade of green, with a wall of keys beyond it. They’re all numbered, with little umbrella-branded tags on them. He leans in, adjusting the strap of Vanya’s violin case, which he’s carrying on his back. 

“You suppose Vanya’s in one of these rooms?” He asks Five, who steps up beside him, also noting the blank spaces on the wall. Some floors, it seems, are more densely-populated than others; the ground floor, for instance, is packed, whereas the fifth has not a single room occupied. 

Five doesn’t answer. He’s too busy deducing the number of rooms they’ll have to search: _Eight floors, nine rooms per floor… No, there are fourteen floors, why the fuck are there so many fucking floors..._

Allison sighs at them, and leans over the counter, _pinging_ the service bell.

The sound rings out, rolling around and around over the curved ceiling, and through the lobby, into the hallways beyond. It’s impossibly loud, making their eardrums tremble.

It shuts everyone up for a moment.

Luther and Diego cease planning their escape, Klaus drops his pamphlet, and Ben takes a few unsteady steps back, away from the counter, like he’s worried it’s going to spring to life and swallow him up. 

In the distance, there’s a rumbling, perhaps the pipes jumping together in service of some enormous bath or shower. And much closer, the sound of spongy footsteps, squishing their way down the hall.

It takes a full minute, for them to reach the lobby, and in that time, no one moves an inch. 

Then, hurrying around the corner, comes… a bellhop.

“Oh thank God,” breathes Klaus, padding towards him, seeing the brass buttons flash in the too-dim light, “Listen, can we get--”

He stops in his tracks.

The bellhop is perhaps seven feet tall, spindly in the way that only emaciated wraiths are, and it has no face.

It has no face, and no discernible ears, only a wrinkled, pinkish knob for a head, and impossibly long fingers, thin and tapered like sewing needles.

Allison gags at the sight of it, and Five’s jaw flaps open.

Once the shock has worn off, Klaus, who’s dealt with creatures that, while not as existentially disturbing as this one, at least vaguely resembled it, flashes his _Hello_ palm, and then blinks, realizing that he has waved at a creature with no eyes.

“Hello,” he tries again. “We’d like to check our sister out. That alright with you, Mr...”

The nametag is blank.

“... Uh…” 

“Klaus?” Diego says, pointing at a framed sign above the desk: ALL CHECK-INS PERMANENT. 

Luther balls up his fists. 

“Oh.” Klaus reaches up to stroke his facial hair in thought, only to realize that this version of him had shaved his chin. Ah, he’s _got_ it: nepotism! He puts on his smarmy my-daddy’s-richer-than-yours voice, the one he uses on his bitchier fangirls and the shitty retail cashiers who ask him to kindly empty his pockets of the goods he’s trying to shoplift, “Well. Just so you _know,_ we’re the owners kids, and you _might_ wanna be nice to us if you wanna keep your--”

“Klaus?” mumbles Allison.

The rumbling is much, much closer now.

It’s so close they can discern it, not as the clinking of pipes, but as the mottled roar of half a hundred voices, the pounding of dozens of individual feet, racing in a mob towards the lobby at full speed…

“I’m sorry, Mr. Bellhop,” whimpers Klaus.

Around the corner, from the far hall, comes a swarm of garish color; dozens of people, of creatures, of robots and monsters of all shapes and sizes, surging towards them in a wave. Villains they recognize, and far more that they don’t. 

“Oh shit,” breathes Five.

“Run,” says Luther. “Now. If we get separated, regroup back here when it’s safe.”

“But--” Diego twists around, a knife already out.

“Right now!” Luther roars, and they scurry like roaches down the hallway, right past the faceless bellhop.

Much of the crowd that’d come roaring in hasn’t followed them, and there’s a cacophonous explosion of violence in the lobby, like it’s already begun to cannibalize itself.

But they’re still being chased, there’s still the pounding of homicidal feet beating into the floor behind them, and they’ve come upon a crossroads, where up ahead comes a stream of ragged, screaming people, brandishing kitchen knives and chair legs. 

“Left!” screams Five. “Wait, no, right!”

They make a right, and Ben, in a blind panic, makes a left and keeps running. 

“Hey!” Klaus cries, skidding on the rug until it’s rolled up under his boots, and turning on his heels to chase after him. “Wait!” 

Five’s fucked up; ahead of them is only a dead end, with an elevator, closed for repairs.

They’re still running towards it, carried by the momentum of their own fear, but they can tell they’re running to nowhere. 

Five, acting purely on instinct, throws his arms around the only person within grabbing range, Allison, and winks away with her. 

Luther skids into the elevator first, tearing the gilded cage away from the shaft as easily as if it were made of paper. He stares down the shaft, into the dilating darkness, and shudders.

Diego’s got his back to him, is tugging a pair of knives from his gauntlets, is staring down the mob, panting heavily, psyching himself up to take as many of the crowd as he can down with him.

“There’s a chance,” he says, “There’s a chance we can fight our way through them, so we have to take--”

Luther snatches Diego around the waist, and leaps into the void. He screams all the way down.

* * *

Allison and Five land in a mess of limbs in the middle of a checkered floor, scrambling off of each other and staring around, wildly, for some enemy to fight.

There’s no one.

Which means…

“You _left_ them?” Allison hisses.

Five throws up his hands. “Look, my impulse control is… well, it’s not fantastic. Sue me. And besides, they're big boys. They'll be fine. They'll have gotten away too."

Allison's silence tells him that she isn't satisfied.

"We’ll just have to find our way back," he insists, "Get Vanya. Kill anyone who tries to stop us.” He frowns. "Would be great if we knew where the hell I just sent us."

“Wait, you don’t know where we _are?”_

“I’m sorry, did _you_ see a map?” 

Allison claws her way to her feet, and peers around.

They’ve landed in an enormous ballroom. The chandeliers are all blazing, hanging dense as stalactites above them, casting the entire room in that same greenish, uncanny light that makes Allison’s head pulse, makes her feel like she’s looking at everything underwater. All around them, dozens of tables are piled high with expensive china, wearing lacy skirts, all dressed for a fabulous dinner party that will never arrive. It’s pristine, _too_ pristine, like no one’s ever set foot in here before. 

The space where they’ve landed has been cleared in a wide circle, probably for dancing. Allison, in spite of herself, feels her gait grow longer, more playful, like she’s about to draw her arms up into the proper position and waltz with a partner made of air. 

Her arms are already half up, her leg extended gracefully, to lead of course, when she catches herself. _What am I doing,_ she thinks. _What am I doing?_

She hates it here. She’s been here maybe twenty minutes and _oh,_ she hates it here. No wonder they’d been greeted with a mob. She’d go rabid if she were forced to stay here as long as some of these people have. What’ll it have been, around seventeen years for the oldest guests?

There’s a soft shuffle of boots behind her. Five, naturally, has immediately located the bar at the far end of the room, and he’s making his way determinedly towards it. They aren’t safe, but they aren’t in danger, and being in a state of unsafeness that suits him, he has decided upon a drink. 

Allison follows, before the urge to dance madly strikes her again. 

Five’s gone behind the counter, remarking unfunnily, “Judging by the turnout, I suppose it’ll be a slow night, so I doubt the management will mind if we serve ourselves,” as he begins rifling through the bottles. “Whiskey sour, right?”

She’s silent. 

He pours her one anyway, peering at the dour look on her face, and deciding to double her dose, clinking his glass to hers, before shoving it into her right hand, the twisted one, the one that she keeps mistaking for a witch’s hand. 

Allison stares at it, moving her drink to her other hand, to turn her twisted one over and over.

"What could've _caused_ this?" she says aloud, without really meaning to.

"Does it remind you of anything?"

It does, actually.

"There was this mission, when I was fourteen. Dr. Terminal. I'm not sure if we ever fought him together, he's the guy with the Death-Bots, and the black hole for a belly--"

"We didn't."

"Right. Well, it was him. And it went badly. And he started sucking a bunch of things into his core, you know, his thing is all about how hungry he is, how he always needs to eat? Well, my arm got caught in the vacuum. Luther pulled me out of it in time, but..."

"But maybe in this world, he didn't?"

"Maybe not." 

“All these changes, huh,” Five says, taking a sip.

Allison suddenly hates the conspiratorial tone he takes, like they’re sharing a private joke together.

 _All these changes,_ she thinks sourly. _Must be so_ fun _for you. Do you have any idea what we’ve lost? What_ I’ve _lost?_

She downs the drink in one gulp, and the burn isn’t enough.

Five’s prattling on about how viscerally uncomfortable it is to ricochet through puberty, from thirteen, to fifteen, to seventeen, and she wants to _shut him up,_ to grab him by his hair and slam him into the corner of the cherrywood counter, until she’s made a bloody dent in his head.

She settles instead for this: “Claire’s gone.”

Five stops pouring. His shoulders slump, and in the mirror behind the bar, Allison can see his face twisting in pain. 

Five’s an expert in time travel, isn’t he? He knows how to get her back, doesn’t he? And there must be a way to get her back, to reach through the timestream and pluck her out of the world from which she’d come, and bring her home. 

“How can we get her back? Can’t you just jump through time and--”

“Allison,” Five sighs. “It doesn’t work like that.”

“Well, how _does_ it work?”

He’s quiet for a moment.

“Well. You’d have to sleep with the right person-- Patrick’s the father, yes?”  
Allison doesn’t answer. 

She doesn’t know, is the truth. She’d jumped from her previous boyfriend to Patrick with only a few days in between, and she’d found out about Claire just before her one-month-anniversary with Patrick and... she doesn’t know. She just doesn’t know. 

Five takes her silence as an answer.

“Whoever he is,” he says quietly, “You’d have to sleep with him. Or get his sperm somehow, which I can help you with, by the way, if you’re so inclined--”

Seeing the look of appall on Allison’s face, Five adjusts. “So, sleep with him then. And when you do, the exact same sperm would have to meet with the exact same egg, and that embryo would have to develop in the exact same womb environment. And that’s just birth. Then there’s everything afterwards.”

Five sets his glass down, staring at it for a while, steeling himself. “The fact is, that getting Claire back, the Claire _you_ know and love is… well, it’s...”

He can’t say it. He doesn’t need to. Allison knows what he’ll say. The word’s sitting next to her like a fellow patron of the bar that’d followed them in from the lobby.

Impossible.

Getting Claire back is impossible.

Allison sucks in a ragged breath, and Five flinches at the sound. He won’t look up at the reflection, won’t turn around and face her.

“Allison, I’m sor--”

She leaps off the stool, letting the crystal of her glass clatter on the fancy carpet as she charges across the ballroom. She isn’t totally sure where she’s headed, but it’ll be away from here, away from Five. She’s got to get away from him, before she leaps across the bar and gets her hands around his throat. 

She’s feeling a million different things right now, all crashing and clashing with each other, all battling for control of her. And she knows, that Five can’t have known that this would happen, that he can’t have planned for her baby to have never been born. He can’t have wanted this for her. But he’d been _there,_ right in front of her, a real, tangible target for her anger and her despair, and she’d wanted to throttle him.

So she reaches for the white-painted double doors at the end of the room, sending them swinging, and charges into what she discovers to be the kitchen. 

There are rows and rows of ovens, of stainless steel countertops, of refrigerators, and, near the doors, a fleet of room service platters on wheeled tables. Allison leans over, snatching the cloche off of the one closest to her, out of sheer curiosity.

And recoils in disgust, when she realizes that the only thing on the plate is a single cockroach, bloated and dead in the middle of it. The cloche goes flying from her hand, clanging like a cymbal across the floor, and the noise is as loud as a gunshot.

There are hands, Five’s hands, catching her by the forearm, tugging her sharply back behind an industrial refrigerator and around the corner from the tables. Allison lets him pull her back, and they crouch together, huddled low. 

One of those things in uniform has come squelching its way from the depths of the kitchen. It reaches around for the cloche, then replaces it, and lingers, feeling each and every plate to ensure that its meal is in place. 

Every single meal is roach.

Allison claps a hand over her mouth in absolute disgust, and leans in, but Five’s tugging on her shoulder again, like a demanding child.

“They’ll see you,” he hisses.

“See me?” she whispers back, “They don’t have _eyes.”_

“Well, somehow, they know where we are. Echolocation, do you think?”

“Then don’t you think it’d _hear_ us?”

“Fair point,” he admits. 

“What the _hell_ is this place?”

“Well, you’ve said it, haven't you? It’s Hell.”

“I hate it here,” Allison fumes, “I absolutely hate--”

Five’s pointing. Allison turns, and follows the path of his hand.

On the counter, there’s a small orange bottle, a painfully familiar one that stirs up all sorts of awful memories in Allison. 

The bellhop is emptying a capsule into its slender hand, grinding it into dust, and then mixing the dust with water, before injecting it into a single brown roach, still twitching. Then, it places the roach exactly in the center of a spotless plate, and sets the plate on a tray. A cloche clangs into place, and then the bellhop is off, busily pushing the trolley through the doors. 

She catches up on Five’s train of thought. “That’s for her.”

Which means they’re drugging Vanya again. Which _means..._

“We follow him, we find Vanya.” 

* * *

Luther had absorbed the impact of their landing with a _boom,_ landing hunched at the bottom of the elevator shaft, his bones vibrating, Diego flopping like a ragdoll in his arms, before squirming like an angry cat. 

He sets Diego down quickly, and they back away from each other, leaning on unsteady legs against the dusty brick walls of the shaft, letting their eyes grow used to the dimness of it as they catch their breaths. They’ve landed in the basement, and ahead of them, a service tunnel stretches dimly into the bowels of the hotel. 

Places cannot be evil, Diego had once believed, but now, he recants his belief. The house, at least, was bought, and therefore had no inherent purpose carved into its foundation. The hotel was built, and therefore it was always meant to imprison. It’s an evil place, and they’ve fed themselves to it, and now they have to find a way to make it spit them out.

Diego pushes himself off the wall with a grunt, and starts walking, bringing his hand up to shake the dust from his hair.

The heavy footfalls behind him tell him that Luther’s done the same.

It feels a little perverse, talking in such a quiet place, like they’ll bring a hoard of monsters down onto their heads, but it feels worse, letting that silence wrap its way around them like a boa constrictor. 

“You ever been here before?”

“No,” Luther rumbles from behind him. “I asked, a few times, but Dad always said _someday.”_

 _Someday,_ of course, being code for _never._

“Are you relieved?”

Luther doesn’t answer.

“Where are we anyway? I mean, where’s the Hotel?”

Luther frowns. “I don’t know. Klaus said something about a lake, right?”

“The Lake of Forgetfulness. It was on one of those brochures.”

“Alright, well, that’s a start.” 

They turn the corner, and leap back in shock. 

The hall’s lined with bodies. Seven or eight of them, all in states of decay. 

“Oh.” Diego’s voice rolls along the smooth walls, “Well, that’s great.”

“What? You gonna fight a dead body?” Luther snarks.

Diego glances down to his hand, which already has a knife unsheathed. He scoffs, lowering his arms, and leaning down to peer at the nearest body. It’d been bludgeoned to death. “Who do you think did this? Those bellhops? Each other?”

“Not sure if I want to find out.” 

Diego stares at the carnage, a chill creeping down his spine at the thought of it repeating itself on some city street. “I hate to say it,” he admits, “But you think Dad’s right, in locking them up here? I mean, they're all caged up in the hotel for seventeen years and their first instinct is to destroy…”

Luther’s quiet for a moment.

“Seventeen years is a lot of time to get angry,” he finally replies, turning away.

They step gingerly around pools of long-dried blood, and keep moving. 

The hotel, Diego’s realizing, must be in a state of revolt; while the lobby might’ve been pristine, large swaths of the place are gutted and torn to shreds. To say nothing of its inhabitants. 

And from what Luther has told them, Vanya’s been here for _months._

“We need to find everyone,” Diego says, and Luther nods beside him.

“At least we’ve ruled out the basement,” Luther says, tugging open a door to a service stairwell, and gesturing for Diego to follow, which he does.

It strikes Luther as a little odd, that he isn’t getting any resistance from Diego, but he isn’t about to question it. They’ve spent so much of their lives at each other's throats, that he doesn’t quite know what to do with Diego when he isn’t snapping at him. He keeps waiting for the insults to come flying in, keeps peering over his shoulder expecting to see a leer. 

They emerge in the middle of an empty recreation room, like the one Diego had spent weeks in while he’d been trapped in 1963. Or rather, it’s what Diego would imagine such a room would appear to be, if it’d been totally empty. 

There are rows and rows of chairs and couches, coffee tables stacked high with magazines that have never been read. A chess board, in the middle of a game.

“White’s winning,” Luther says, mostly to himself. 

“Huh?”

“Nothing.”

That preternatural quiet’s upon them again, and Diego doesn’t like the effect it has on him, the way it creeps below his skin like a needle and digs and _digs._ He needs to say something, to find a welcome distraction. 

He thinks he has one, actually. 

“Five’s your twin, right?”

“Yeah,” Luther says, and his mouth quirks into a slightly mystified smile. “Isn’t it _strange?_ We look totally different, we have different voices and personalities. We’re not alike. We’re _nothing_ alike. We don’t have a _thing_ in common.” 

Diego shakes his head, the corner of his lip perking up in a smile. “Oh, I can think of _one_ thing.”

“What?”

Diego considers it. 

Allison and Luther, for what it’s worth, were not subtle. He’s suffered too many years of watching the two of them make goo-goo eyes at each other to not pick up on what’s going on there.

Five and Vanya, though. Now that’s something that’s going to make him go over each and every one of his interactions with them with a fine-toothed comb, looking for signs he’d been too up his own ass to have noticed. 

And honestly, he doesn’t know how to approach as delicate a topic as how exactly certain members of his family had grown fond of each other in ways that most people would twist up their faces in disgust and patronizing concern at. Sure, all the books say that all those things they are to each other are inherently exclusive, but none of them have ever met a family quite like his. 

The way he sees it, however they find their peace in the middle of all of this mess, good on them. Maybe he’ll find himself a piece of that too, when the time is right. Something in him swells at the thought; for as long as he can remember, there'd only ever been the mission, only ever been chasing after Luther, snapping at his coattails, only ever been room for _him,_ but now... he feels _different_ now, he feels settled, like all that room in him that'd been taken up by his own sense of self-importance is free, and now there's a space opening up inside of him that he's never imagined could be there at all, space enough for someone else. Now, _maybe..._

Well. That's beside the point. They have to get out of here first. They have to find Klaus and Ben, and Allison, and Five, and Vanya. They have to live through this.

“You know what, you figure it out.”

Luther reaches down to the chess set, and plucks up the black king. 

“I can’t believe Dad wouldn’t tell us,” Luther says. 

“He didn’t tell us a lot of things.”

What Diego’s referring to is obvious. Luther remembers again, his conversation with Dad in the study, and he remembers that agent, a bouncing ball of hellfire who’d leapt in and swept their legs out from under them and vanished as quickly as she’d come.

Luther peers at him. “That woman.”

“Yeah.”

“What the hell _was_ that? Who _was_ she?”

Diego simply shrugs. “What I’m wondering is if Dad knew. That there are others like us, I mean.” 

“He kept so many things, so many secrets from us,” Luther replies, his voice tense as glass in the moment before it breaks.

Diego decides to leave it at that. There’s something in the way his brother’s shoulders are sloped that tells him he’s practically shaking with anger, about to erupt.

There’s a spill of sound, from a hallway over, the creaking scrape of a table dragged across tile.

Luther drives his fist, up and into the wall, so quick it can’t have been anything other than a reflex, but the way his jaw’s set and his eyes are blazing suggests to Diego that he meant it. A lot.

The noise vanishes.

And, as Luther draws his fist out of the plaster, wiping white dust from his knuckles, so does the hole he’s left behind, sewing itself shut like a strange, self-healing wound.

* * *

It’s quiet again. So quiet that they may well be the only people in the world.

A few days ago, Ben would’ve been perfectly content with such a thing. 

_Funny,_ he thinks, glancing over at Klaus, _how so much can change so quickly._

Ben runs his hands along the seam in Vanya’s violin case, clutched to his chest. His heart’s hammering against it. His heart’s hammering, it’s _beating,_ it’s beating so _fast_ and he doesn’t remember how to slow it down, he doesn't remember how to settle himself. It’ll beat and beat until it tears right through his chest and goes pulsing across the filthy floor of the bathroom they’ve hidden in. He screws his eyes shut, to focus on his breaths, to try and slow them, but he’s unmoored, unable to find anything to steady himself with...

Klaus’s bony shoulder presses into his, and he hates how he leans into it. He hates how stupid he is, for taking that tiny bit of contact and settling so quickly because of it. Doesn’t Ben _know_ by now, that he’s just going to pull it away before Ben’s come back to earth? 

He opens his eyes, hating that it worked.

They’ve sheltered in a womens’ bathroom, three floors up. Klaus had grabbed him by an elbow, and dragged him up a fire stairwell. He’d sent his bowl sailing into the fishy face of a man that’d taken a swipe at them one landing up, and then they’d burst right around the corner into this bathroom. They’ve been here ever since, listening to the pounding of footsteps below them die down, waiting for someone to find them.

And someone _will_ find them, if they stay here. The bathroom’s destroyed. There’s nowhere to hide at all; someone had ripped out all the stall dividers, and, bafflingly, the toilets. 

“There must be some kind of way out of here,” Klaus whispers.

He’s picking at the black polish on his nails, and is nearly one hand free of polish. Now he remembers why he never bothers with painting them anymore. “... They just start chipping right away,” He’s babbling, half under his breath, “Toenails? They could literally last through armageddon. Fingernails, the second you put a coat on, they start flaking off. _Useless!”_

Ben snorts, then, remembering he’s meant to be mad, turns away quickly. 

Behind him, Klaus shuts up. 

He slings the violin back over his shoulder, scrambling sloppily to his feet, in order to avoid touching the floor with his hands; he’s quite certain that if he were to shine a blacklight in here, it’d blind him.

There’s dirt, or what he sincerely _hopes_ is dirt, smeared across the floor, wads of used tissue everywhere, and…

And a Magic 8-Ball? Yeah, that’s a Magic 8-Ball, rolled into the corner near the door.

 _Sure,_ Ben thinks. _Why not?_

From what Ben had managed to divine from Klaus about his brief trip to the other side, God apparently exists, which, whoops, lost _that_ bet, so he supposes he’ll see if She’ll give him a nugget of wisdom. She’s already played a joke on him, sticking him with Klaus when he’s finally able to actually talk to other people for once, so She owes him one. 

Ben picks the ball up, and consults it. He glances at the door.

_O Magic 8-Ball, tell me, is it safe to leave the bathroom?_

He gives the ball a hearty shake, and checks. 

_For Certain This Time._

Well, good enough for him.

Ben makes for the door, and there’s a rustling behind him. 

Klaus is skidding to his feet, leaning forward inquisitively. “Are we leaving?”

 _“I_ am.”

 _“You_ are? What about us?”

Ben fixes him with a withering glare. Klaus is oblivious, but he isn’t stupid; he knows exactly what he’s referring to. 

"You want to be alone, right?"

Klaus winces.

“Come on,” he spreads his arms placatingly, “New timeline, new us. Let’s just forget about all of that shit and get back to how we were, huh?”

“Well,” Ben says quietly. “Maybe I don’t want to go back to that.”

Klaus can’t find a response to that, but he’s looking. He digs the toe of his boot into the linoleum, dragging a scuff across the tile, and hooks his fingers in his belt. “I didn’t mean it, you know. I don’t think you’re a burden. I don’t… I don’t want you to go, okay?”

Ben feels raw and hurt in a horribly familiar way, a way that even death hadn’t spared him. 

“Yeah? _Watch_ me.”

He tries to relish the way Klaus’s face screws up, but it doesn’t really make him feel any better. But Ben said he would, so he will. 

He swings the door open, to prove a point.

On the other side, is an enormous, beach-ball sized floating eyeball. 

_Fucking ball,_ Ben curses.

“Oh shit!” squawks Klaus, who draws back his fist and punches, reflexively, right into the pupil.

Ben steals right past him, and then they’re running, Klaus wincing at the gelatinous substance his hand had come away covered in, wiping it on the wall as they pass by. He has no idea if he’d killed the whatever-that-was or not, or even slowed it, but he doesn’t feel inclined to turn around and see.

Then, Ben has him by the arm, and is tugging him through a door that’s been left ajar. It slams behind them, louder than they ought’ve let it, given how sound carries, but that’s far from their most dominant concern, when they’re hit by the stink of rot, clapping their hands over their mouths and noses and coughing.

There’s a corpse on the bed. 

It’s old. So old its skin has turned to leather and shrunken like plastic wrap around its face. Klaus glances around the room on reflex, but there’s no one. This guy, whoever he was, had moved right on after he’d died.

Klaus leans over his face, blinking. He knows him, actually; this is John Perseus the Ninth, C.E.O. of that company that’s always up Dad’s ass. This is the guy who’d had a bit too much champagne, stared at them all during a gala when they were fifteen, and declared slurringly that they were a circus of oddities, which, _well..._

 _Guess that rivalry got a little heated in this world,_ he thinks. 

Ben makes a choked little noise, and Klaus follows his line of sight. His eyes are adjusting to the still darkness of the room, learning to decipher the thin, grayish planes cast by the stripes of light peeking around the edges of the door. 

And when he sees what’s pooled around the man’s wrists, he gets it. 

“We can’t stay here,” Klaus says immediately.

He doesn’t brush on why. They both have their own reasons for it.

“Yeah,” Ben says, “Yeah, we have to go, we--”

He’s got the door open, and they aren’t alone.

The whole fucking cavalry’s here, and a swarm of hands descends on them. 

It’s one thing, getting the shit kicked out of you by a horde of villains. It’s another to get the shit kicked out of you by a horde of villains who’ve all fought you, but who you have never met before. Especially by a horde of villains comprised of: two people with cat-heads, the single fattest man he’s ever seen, a woman who looks like she’d been drowned at the bottom of a lake, left there for sixty years, and then opted to resurface and haunt them all, a floating bust of Abraham Lincoln, a biker, and an archer with a flapper haircut. 

_It’s like if Halloween threw up,_ Ben thinks, as he’s dragged by his heels across the floor, so quickly that he’s sure he’s halfway to getting carpet burn across his back. His hands are tied by a length of shredded bedsheet, which is uniquely humiliating. 

He glances over, at Klaus, also groggy and limp and trailing, and they watch each other for a moment, holding each other’s gaze, as they’re tugged deeper into the bowels of the hotel, into this particular band’s territory. 

_A gang,_ Ben realizes. _They’re not all uniform, are they? They’d practically eaten each other down at the lobby. Everyone here’s had the time to organize into factions, and we’ve been caught by a gang._

Ben’s deduction is correct, and soon enough, they discover who’s leading them. 

They can feel him, long before they see him; the stubborn tug of a strange, second force of gravity, the sweltering heat of the core of a collapsing star. 

Ben and Klaus, unlike Five, had been present on the missions where they’d encountered this particular villain, which is how they know exactly how fucked they are. 

Dr. Terminal has no Death-Bots in Hotel Oblivion; the management had never allowed that, for obvious reasons. But he makes do just fine with a pack of loyal followers, all eager as he for dominion over their home. 

And then, they’re tossed at his feet. 

* * *

Vanya has no intention of staying here.

But to leave her room, to make it all the way down to the ground floor of the hotel, to make it out, she’s going to have to be able to defend herself. 

Vanya has precious little experience with supervillains; she’s never gone on a mission in her life, and there’s only one time she’d ever come into contact with one. She doesn’t remember his name, doesn’t even remember his face, but she remembers that day.

Dad started locking her in her room during missions, after that first one, the one he’d dragged her along to, in order to prove a point. But one day he’d forgotten… no, _Mom_ had unlocked it, had said she was fourteen and could be trusted to care for herself. But the house had been invaded, and she’d been kidnapped. It had been one of the final nails in the coffin that shipped her off to boarding school. That and her failed stint as a runaway, and Ben; Dad caught them holding hands. 

The point is: Vanya has basically no experience with supercriminals.

And now, she’s trapped in a building stacked high with villains her siblings had fought, villains _she_ and her siblings had fought. People who hate her, who know how this other version of her fought, who’ll know how her power works even better than she does. They’ll want to kill her, they’ll want to hurt her, and she’ll have to be prepared to fight her way out of this place. 

And Vanya, who’d never been taught to fight with fists or weapons as her siblings had, who is scarcely over five feet in height and built as lightly as a bird, really only has her power to protect herself with.

Which poses a serious problem, as her food has been drugged.

After determining the most likely cause of her foggy-headedness, Vanya had resolved to eat nothing at all. The cloud over her mind is lifting, but it isn’t gone just yet, and there’s a hollowness in her gut that’s certainly going to cause her a lot of problems; whatever she’d eaten before her consciousness had leapt into this body, it hadn’t been substantial at all, and Vanya spends a while staring at herself distressedly in the mirror, noting the way her ribs poke out of her skin, and how her eyes have sunken into her alarmingly pale face. She’s not being fed well, but maybe that’s a good thing, maybe that can work for her. If she’s used to being hungry, then she can deal with it a while longer. 

She decides to start with baby steps; opening the door, stepping out into the hall for a second, then two, then ten. 

And her current quest: making it down the hall, to the curtain.

She has to do it, she knows. She has to find out where she is, and if there’s a window that hasn’t been boarded or bricked up, she must look through it, to determine where in the world she’s been taken. 

So Vanya takes a step, then another, then another. It takes ten seconds to walk down the hall, but the seconds last for years, and by the time Vanya’s reached the curtain, she’s absolutely certain that some feat of cosmic misfortune will punish her for daring to look. 

_Maybe not looking is good,_ a paranoid part of her thinks. _Maybe if I don’t look, I’ll be safer. Maybe I’ll only be punished, for trying to see something I shouldn’t. Dad always hated when I asked questions, after all._

But she has to look. She’s faced with a choice now, of whether she’d rather die in blissful ignorance, or whether she’d rather stare what’s happened in the face.

And, well. What has ignorance given her, but a slower, consuming pain?

Vanya throws the curtain open.

The window isn’t covered. The glass is clear enough to see through, if smudged by dozens of strange hands. There’s a soft bluish glare coming from a neon sign she can only sort of glimpse at this angle, probably advertising the hotel to any who come across it. 

Not that it seems like anyone could; the Hotel Oblivion seems to be situated in the middle of a desert, and there are no roads she can see leading in any direction, only an infinite expanse of dusty stone and dirt painted silver by the stars. It’s nighttime, a night so black that she can see the pinpricks of the stars clearly, like little holes in the velvety black cloth of a dream. 

_Maybe I’m just at the back of the hotel,_ she reasons. _The road is somewhere behind me._

There’s a man out there, sitting on the crest of a stony hill, staring off into the night. She can hardly make out a single of his features, only the vague bluish hue the stars give him. She stifles the rather stupid urge to wave at him, as if he might somehow sense it and turn, and see her. 

Well, that should reassure her, shouldn’t it? Someone’s outside. Someone from the Hotel, or from someplace nearby. If he’s from the Hotel, then the way out is certain. And if he’s from someplace nearby, then there’s somewhere Vanya can run to that isn’t the flat desert. Maybe there’ll be a phone there, or a bus stop. She doesn’t have any money in these strange white pajamas she has, but maybe if she--

Behind her, the elevator _pings._

Vanya turns on the balls of her feet, and sprints down the hall, her loose shirt billowing behind her as she races towards…

No. 

She turns on the pads of her bare feet, and hurries back the way she’d come, snatching the enormous blue curtain and burying herself in the alcove behind it, pressing her back to the cold wall and clamping her hands over her mouth. 

Vanya closes her eyes, throwing out her hearing, down the elevator shaft.

Two heartbeats. Two people, and judging by the pattern of their hearts, they’re middle-aged.

“... did you see that?”

“... some sort of displacement? Do you think…”

The doors open.

And two sets of heavy footfalls clunk their way onto her floor. 

“... What about the Scientific Man?”

“Well, Obscura, just pray he doesn’t notice. We’re getting out of here, one way or another.” 

Obscura. She knows that name. It brings to mind a memory, of a man in a pinstriped suit, with a camera fused over his eye. 

And, now that she thinks of it, she knows the voice of his companion. He’s the Murder Magician; he’d blown up some hospital when her siblings were sixteen. She remembers watching coverage of the event on television in the common room of her dormitory, holding her breath and counting the number of dark-outfitted masked teenagers that had come out of the side entrance, just to be sure everyone had made it.

Now, she supposes, she’d have gone on that mission too, if the tattoo on her arm is any indication.

The men’s footsteps are treading down the hall, that same number of paces Vanya had made to get to her room, and they’re trying the door. She was right, she realizes, to have run back to hide here.

Her door creaks open. It doesn’t lock, she’d discovered and _oh,_ is she glad she’d realized it. 

“She’s not here.”

“No?”

“Oh, well maybe she got bored of the penthouse suite and went down to mingle with the rest of us.”

_I’m on the top floor? Gee, thanks Dad._

“I’m sure Teviso’s planning quite the welcome, given how badly she fucked him up. ‘Course, maybe she’ll have to take a number. You know, the _rest_ of them are here now too?”

“You’re _joking.”_

“Am not. Whole class just landed here for a field trip."

 _My family,_ Vanya realizes. _My family is here. They hadn't been here at all; it'd only been me, and they've come._

Her family is here, and they could have only come for her.

Vanya peeks out, from behind her curtain, and sees her chance.

The elevator is open, and Vanya races into it, slamming a button at random and listening to the urgent clatter of footfalls rushing up the hall after her, the brassy clicking of buttons being pressed urgently. 

But Vanya’s safe, for now, riding down to her family. She's not content to wait around for them to reach her, and instead resolves to meet them halfway.

Vanya, despite the ache of hunger in her head and the fearful pummeling of her heart against her ribcage, finds herself smiling in pure elation; she's finally coming home.

* * *

The rain’s gone from a mist to a drizzle to a pattering to a downpour, and it hasn’t relented, not for days, days which Lila has spent subsisting on the remaining Fudge Nutters in the vending machines that hadn’t exploded, and wandering the ruined halls, and trying not to cry again and again.

Lila sits out on her obstacle course tower every day for an hour, tugging her bomber jacket tightly around herself, picking at her nail polish, waiting dutifully.

But no one comes. And no one is coming. 

The Commission won’t be coming back. She’s waited for so long, and no stray agents have blinked in from their field assignments, wide-eyed and shocked at the state of the place. It really is _just_ her.

So she slides down the rope, and returns to her mother’s office. She’s made camp there, in the last few days. Lila has taken to sleeping under her mother’s desk and pilfering her cabinets and desk drawers. 

It felt like trespassing, digging through Mother’s things. But Lila had found it oddly invigorating, the thought that her unwanted presence in her mother’s drawers might summon her spirit from beyond the grave to punish her for pilfering them. Then she’d be _back,_ and then she’d tell her what to do.

She didn’t. Like that needs saying. 

But Lila still rooted into her belongings, tugging out tubes of lipstick and eyeliner, half-empty bottles of crimson nail polish, loose pens and cigarettes, which she smoked the last of a few hours ago. 

Carmichael, Lila notes, seems to have started moving into her desk already, the slimy old fish. She cites the presence of his official stamp in one of her mother’s drawers, the locked one that she’s always so serious about Lila never looking in, as proof.

And since he’s clearly been here, she feels a little better about looking, but there isn’t much of anything inside of it, just a little tin in the bottom, which is light and full of small hard things that rattle when she shakes it.

Lila pries it open, hoping for sleeping pills, but instead, she finds that it’s full of tiny little teeth. Her baby teeth. She takes the little molars in her hands, rolling them over and over between her fingers, and rubs at her eyes with her wrist. 

She looks across the room, to her mother’s fine glass case, filled with her finest trophies, and frowns at how someone had taken her photograph from its rightful place among her mother’s greatest spoils, and left it so carelessly on her desk, the way Mother never would’ve left it. 

Lila reaches across the desk, to take the little photo frame in her hands, and pulls a face, imitating the cross little pout her child self had made that day. She remembers the flash of the camera, the way she’d insisted that the photographer had gotten her name wrong, the way she’d been so worried she’d get in trouble for it.

 _Well, maybe he had,_ she reflects.

She isn’t even sure if _Lila Pitts_ is the name her parents had given her, or the one her mother had chosen after she’d adopted her. Sometimes, she’s pretty sure she’d been named something else; she can almost remember it, the word dancing on the edge of her subconscious, floating through her mind in dreams, woven into the soft lull of a song she remembers her birth mother singing to her. That’s fuzzy too, and she can’t make out the words anymore, or even the tune, just the tones. 

But _Lila Pitts_ is what she has; it’s the first gift her mother had ever given her. So she keeps it. Really, she’s _grateful_ for it; her mother had saved her, had plucked her-- tiny, inconsequential _her--_ up from the gory mess of a robbery gone wrong, mopped her mother and father’s brains from her face, and whisked her away to live an extraordinary life. 

Without her mother, she’d not be able to speak twenty business-essential languages fluently. She’d not be adept at lockpicking, typing, subterfuge, small-talk, garroting, filing or knifeplay. She’d not be nimble as a cat when she leaps over rooftops, or adept at dancing the foxtrot. She’d have grown up in Brent, gone to some stuffy underfunded school, and been given an education so dull she’d have likely turned into an idiot.

Without her mother, she’d have never grown up knowing about how special she is. She isn’t like the Umbrella Academy, see, her mother didn’t lie to her, and she’s always known what she is. She’s always known that she’d been born on a flash-- on an _airplane,_ oh, that _must_ have been terribly awkward-- and that by having done so, an extraordinary power had been imbued in her, and had thus reserved her an extraordinary destiny all her own. 

Without her mother, she’d have never gotten to fulfill it. She’d have grown up, with no idea as to her wondrous talent, and she’d have lived a humdrum life, without ever so much as running into a fellow member of her cosmic litter. Or, if she had, perhaps she’d have lost control entirely.

But thanks to her mother, she’s had a fabulous education, and known from the moment she’d been carried through those big glass doors that she’s special. Thanks to her mother, she’d grown up knowing her power and how it works. She may have practically no practice in it, but she doesn’t _need_ practice to be special.

She’d never dream of replacing Mother, never ever.

But a part of Lila thinks, _well, maybe, now that the Commission is over with and there’s no hope of resurrecting it, I can retire to the time of my choosing. Sure, it’s been twenty-three years since I was brought here, and I still haven’t fulfilled my five-year contract yet, but it’s not like that should matter, now that there’s no one left to enforce it._

And if she can retire to wherever she pleases, then maybe, just maybe…

Lila pays a visit to the utterly desecrated briefcase room. It’d exploded again, in the fire, and half of it’s buried under chunks of concrete, but she has nothing but time, so she digs a tunnel through to the storage room, and sifts through the wreckage until she finds one case, at the bottom of the pile and therefore shielded, that is intact enough to be deemed fixable.

She retrieves a toolkit and a manual from a maintenance closet, returns to her mother’s office, and sets to it, working like a busy little bee through the afternoon and into the night and up until the next morning. 

It’s her way out, her way home.

She’s going _home,_ home to London, home to the parents she’d hardly gotten to know, to the butter-yellow kitchen in the warm flat she can barely remember. She’s going back to 1993, to the day of the robbery, and she’s going to save them. 

A shower of sparks erupts from the briefcase, singing her hand, and she sighs, throwing her wrench across her mother’s desk, and opting for a break. She’s nearly done, after all, she deserves a break.

She spends it picking at her photograph now, playing with the underside of the little portrait and tugging the velvety backing away from it, so she can take a better look at the photo.

And she frowns.

On the back, in her mother’s loopy handwriting, is a neat little note: `K.O. 743`

She recognizes the designation as one of the Commission’s own, and, eager for something to do, she hurries down into the half-collapsed basement of the archives, and goes digging for it. 

After a few hours, she finds it.

Kill Order #743.

Lila frowns, and reads it once, twice, three times. Then, she takes it out of the dim basement, and into the watery rain-muddled daylight, to check the words again, to make certain she’s understanding them correctly. 

She is.

In the summer of 1993, when Lila had been nearly four years old, her parents, who had been named Ronnie and Anita _(Ronnie and Anita,_ she rolls the names over and over in her mind and her mouth; _Ronnie and Anita, Ronnie-and-Anita, RonnieandAnita...),_ hadn’t been killed in a robbery gone wrong.

They’d been assassinated. 

Lila reads the words over and over: terminate with extreme prejudice.

And she knows exactly what it implies. She knows that those odd dreams, she’d have, sometimes, about twisted, wriggling shapes, hog-tied on the floor and whimpering, were not dreams at all, but memories. 

She stares at the little red stamp of approval in the corner, the insignia she’d seen in her mother’s desk a day ago. Carmichael had issued it, and Lila’s vision goes red at the thought that he’d been killed before she could get her hands on him. The Hargreeves really have taken everything from her.

And then, she reads the name of the agent assigned the case.

Number Five.

She tears the file to shreds, beats her knuckles bloody against the file cabinet, and screams herself hoarse; of _course,_ it’s Number Five. He couldn’t _resist,_ could he? He and the rest of his family, that’s all they do, isn’t it? They just take and take and take, draining her like a clan of vampires, and now they’ve left her with nothing. 

_But that’s okay,_ Lila thinks manically, charging up to her mother’s office, to set the last of the wires in place. _I now have nothing, which means I have nothing to lose._

The briefcase she’s salvaged is good for one trip only. It’ll come undone from the stress of the trip, but it’ll get her where she wants to go.

So.

Now Lila must decide where she wants to go.

She has all of history to choose from. She could go right back to 1963 and order room service from her wonderful hotel suite. She could turn back the dial thousands of years, travel to Egypt and watch the pyramids be built. And now that the Commission is gone, she could even go to the future, to see what humanity would’ve become. She's standing at an intersection with a thousand different routes to choose from, but only two really matter to her. 

She could have a new start, if she wanted it. 

But she doesn’t want it, is the thing.

There’s only one thing she wants now, only one thing that'll dull the pain from the gaping wound that's opened up within her. 

She has all of time in front of her, and she knows exactly where she has to go, and what she has to do. 

She picks her path.

Lila spends one last evening at home.

She paints her eyes with broad smears of her mother’s dark makeup, making sure to keep it dark enough to cover the puffiness. She combs her fingers through her stringy hair, and decides to dye the ends later. She paints her nails black, and zips up her bomber jacket. 

Then, she goes back to her mother’s office, folds the little Lila into her breast pocket, and reaches for her briefcase. 

Lila aches, for a moment, about what she’s giving up, before she flicks the chronometer. But it’s something that she cannot avoid. Her blood’s hot and pounding in her ears, her nails itching for something to scratch. She wants a blood sacrifice, and she has nothing to lose, and this thing that she’s about to do, well, it simply must be done.

She turns the dial to 1993. And keeps turning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Me? Scavenging minimal images from the Hotel Oblivion comic arc and repurposing it for my own methods? It's more likely than you think!


	3. heart and soul

Lila Pitts lands on the second of April, 2019, three blocks from the Hargreeves mansion. 

She lands flat on her feet, in a flash of ice-blue temporal light, and the briefcase in her hand sputters for a moment, before exploding in a cloud of blue smoke. Sparks shoot from the side panel, catching on her black jeans and searing at her skin. 

She yelps, spinning sharply, and letting the momentum of her movement send the case sail in a gorgeously long arc out into the middle of traffic, where it bounces off the windshield of a taxi and promptly explodes, sending said taxi smashing into a fire hydrant. 

_Well,_ she thinks dully, clasping her burnt hand and cradling it protectively against her chest, _if there was any doubt about my going back..._

Not that there was. She knew what would happen, when she came here. She knew it’d be permanent, and she accepts it. It must be done, and so it shall be done. She will kill them all, starting with Number Five, and then this ache in her will be sated. And then she will be free.

She takes a moment, turning to peer at her surroundings, noting that the skyscrapers are, in fact, intact and there are, in fact, dozens upon dozens of people roaming the streets in the middle of this gray spring day. According to a newspaper kiosk at the end of the street corner, she’s landed days after the apocalypse, which tells her that the Academy had succeeded after all.

Well, good on them, she supposes, not that she cares much either way. She couldn’t care less about the world and its pains, not when she needs to remedy her own. 

Lila has gathered that she’s landed slightly off-focus, being that she has not found herself staring up at the famous face of the Hargreeves mansion. It pisses her off, just a bit, but given the state her briefcase had been, she’s frankly a little grateful that she hadn’t landed half-phased through a wall. And besides, according to the map kiosk mounted on the side of the bus stop, she’s only a few streets away.

She decides to take her time, stopping by a drugstore to find some bandages to wrap her hand in. On her way out, just on an impulse, she nicks a box of cheap auburn dye from the beauty aisle. 

The Hargreeves mansion is admittedly impressive, but laughably unguarded. _Really,_ Lila walks right in through the rear door, as easily as though she were a teenager sneaking her way back after a night out partying.

It’s dim and quiet as a tomb inside, and the walls are lined with glass, filled with comic books and figurines and collectibles. Seems her mother and their father have similar taste in decor. Lila drags her fingers along the glass, making sure to smear it extra well, and, once she’s determined by the absolute stillness of her surroundings that there’s simply no one home, she decides to make the place hers.

Lila drags dirt into the nice floors, reaching up to the taxidermied horns of a wildebeest head mounted on the wall and swings on it until it pops off, and she sets it sheepishly onto a chaise that’s probably three times her age. She takes her dye and positively desecrates the antique sink in the nice bathroom on the ground floor. 

She struts into a positively enormous kitchen, one clearly meant to cook for dinner parties with a guest list the length of a school register, and woefully wasted on a handful of stunted man-and-womanchildren, a monkey and their geriatric old daddy. Lila intends to raid the refrigerator for whatever fabulously expensive foods billionaires and their private cults maintain, but she is distracted.

All this while, she’s been wondering where the family’s gone, and on the counter, she finds her answer.

There’s a mugshot of Lila’s white whale, the very woman who’d eluded her in Dallas, whose power she’d been an inch from grabbing hold of, Vanya Hargreeves herself. A sparsely-worded file revealing that Miss Vanya Hargreeves had been a very naughty girl indeed, trying to end the world again. Lila tuts amusedly at this particular factoid.

 _Oh, lucky little shit,_ Lila hisses internally, when she learns the brat had been given a slap on the wrist for trying to cause the apocalypse, having been sent off on some fabulous permanent vacation at a hotel. When Mother had caught Lila trying to use a briefcase to travel to the nineties, she’d had her arm broken for her insolence. She’d have quite literally _killed_ to get to go to a hotel. Does it have a spa? Those fun little cucumber things you put on your eyes? Are those edible?

Anyway.

There’s a schematic here, tangled among the loose pages. It’s of an elevator, somewhere in the basement, and Lila tucks the blueprint under her arm, padding down to the dusty maze of half-finished passages that makes up said basement, nine or ten different ones, all clumsily bound together by rough tunnels. 

She finds it rather quickly, given the trail of debris leading to it, and shrugs quizzically to no one in particular at the sight of the half-destroyed wall in front of it. Which poses a uniquely appealing sort of question, that Lila decides to relieve herself of.

Said question being, _why hide the elevator, unless it leads somewhere important?_

Lila, always one in the spirit of adventure, steps inside the clunky old thing, wincing at the way it sways, and stares at the keypad.

There’d been a combination, listed out on the blueprint, and she figures, what’s the harm, so she punches it in.

As it turns out, there is quite a bit of harm, as she finds herself hurtling through space in a stomach-clenching flash, before jerking to a halt in somewhere utterly unexpected. 

_Ping._

Lila steps out, into the lobby of Hotel Oblivion.

When she realizes where she is, she finds herself laughing in delight.

* * *

The plan was simple and logical.

And, well. Five and Allison, being of the Hargreeves family, and of the Umbrella Academy, ought to have learned by now that the universe will never allow a simple, logical plan of theirs to go off without some sort of hitch. Forgive them; like the rest of their siblings, they are slow learners, and still bound to a childlike naivete, still bound to the sense that _maybe just once, things will go right._

Things hadn’t. The plan had begun unfurling, and along came the hitch, right on cue.

The hitch, in this particular case: a half-wild woman with hooks for hands who had a particularly nasty bone to pick with Allison, who’d leapt down from a vent in the ceiling and distracted them long enough to make them lose track of their mark somewhere on the fourth floor. 

They made it out of that scuffle alive and mostly-unscathed, and quite confused; Five, because they’d followed the faceless bellhop deep into the labyrinth of halls, and found themselves without a clear inclination as to which floor they were on, and Allison, wondering who on earth this woman whose throat she’d just stomped in with the heel of her boot was, and why she’d cried out for her blood.

“Who the hell was _that?”_ she hisses to Five, who shrugs.

“Shouldn’t you know?” Five moves to shove his hands in his pockets, then grumbles upon realizing that the mission uniforms were, in fact, pocketless. So he shoves his hands in his utility belt as he peers up at the rectangular hole in the ceiling from which their assailant had leapt like a jumping spider. “You were a part of this a lot longer than I ever was. When I left we were still doing bank robberies; when’d that change, by the way?” 

Allison sighs, scraping the heel of her boot along the green carpet, watching a paintbrush-smear of blood trail after her sole. “A little before the end. Or, _our_ end, not theirs.”

She glances down the hall. “Suppose it’s worth taking the elevator and taking a chance on a floor?”

Five shakes his head, tapping at a boarded-up door. On this floor, each and every room’s been nailed shut from the outside, barricaded with rough chunks of wood that look like they’ve been harvested from the floor. Vanya shouldn’t be behind one of these doors, as the bellhop had kept going, only passing through this hall to access the elevator on the other side. 

_It seems that this has been done recently,_ he concludes, and dread skitters down his spine at the thought of what had had to happen to provoke an entire floor being boarded up. Something is happening inside Hotel Oblivion, something awful, and he can’t tell if it’s some loose band of criminals that are responsible for this, or if it’s the bellhops. He can’t tell which is worse.

The door taps back. 

He leaps back, as though he’d stuck his finger in an electric socket.

Behind him, Allison barks out a quick, scratchy laugh, and Five twists his mouth up, turning to return his attention to the hole, gaping like an open wound, to the faint metallic shine of what he now realizes is an air duct.

“Here,” he says. “Give me a leg up.”

“Just jump,” she snaps. “What’s stopping you?”

Five has a healthy hesitancy of jumping into narrow spaces unseen; he’s comfortable enough with the risks entailed in leaping into a hallway or room he doesn’t have a direct eyeline to, as there’s enough space for the vacuum to spit him out into without impaling him upon something. Even closets, after a period of intense anxiety when he was ten, at which time he’d landed in a janitorial closet to find a mop fused into the back of his uniform jacket, had become comfortable prospects.

But he’s never liked crawlspaces of any sort; when he was six, Five had zigged when he should have zagged during a game of hide-and-seek, and found himself blinking into the space between two walls on the second floor. He’d been pinned between them, caught between the pipes. Not impaled, but pinned in the dark, sucking dust into his lungs with every heaving breath, trembling at the hideous sensation of spiders and house centipedes creeping over his body, just as panicked as he. 

They’d found him four hours later, when Luther had torn a hole through the wall, after finding the source of his cries. He’d come out suitably shaken, unable to speak at all for days, and utterly terrified of tight, dark spaces for far longer.

His fear of the dark had left him, eventually. In the dusty, dead world he’d found himself trapped in for decades, there had been an abundance of darkness, so complete and ubiquitous that he could never truly escape it; it lay around him like a sleeping dragon at night, waiting for his fires to die down so it might reach in and swallow him. And so, as he had resolved to live, he resolved to face this dragon, and as he could not slay it, he’d chosen instead to accept its presence. He could not change it, and while he never quite warmed to it, his fear had faded nonetheless. And in his time as a company man, the monster had become familiar, even friendly, as an ally in some of his work. 

His fear of tight, claustrophobic spaces, though, had stayed.

“I don’t want to risk it,” he says tersely.

By the tense set in his shoulders, Allison can sense that she’s touched upon a nerve of some sort, and decides not to pull upon it any further. So she nods quickly, and obliges.

Once he’s inside, and concludes the ducts are spacious enough for the both of them to crawl through, he turns, and offers a slender arm down to tug her up after him. 

“Seeing as we’ve already lost our lead,” he says, “We may as well keep out of the open.”

Allison wipes a streak of blood off her cheek, falling like a heavy red tear down the side of her face, and nods, kicking off of the wall to help him tug her up, and grimacing as the sharp edge of the ceiling digs into her belly. 

She finds her way in, and they set to tunneling like rats through the veins of the Hotel, trying not to grumble in disgust every time a roach skitters out from between their legs or over their fingers. Five leads, and Allison doesn’t protest; given what had just leapt out at them, crying out for her blood, she’s quite content to let him be the first line of defense against any fellow burrowers who’d had the same idea as them and Hook Lady.

 _Though,_ she thinks grimly, _seeing as I’m holding the rear, I’d better be ready to kick like fuck if I hear something bigger than a rat coming up behind me. Or maybe it’ll be that woman, back from the dead._

She thinks back, inevitably, to that woman. They’d left her body lying in the center of the hallway. Would someone come for her? And if they did, would they wrap her up, take her to be buried, or simply loot her and leave her? Or would she remain, to saturate the carpet with blood, to go stiff and stink up the hall? Is someone missing her?

Something in her chest feels unbearably heavy, like it might sink out through her skin and clatter onto the metal between her hands as she crawls. 

“You okay?” Five’s voice rumbles off the metal of the walls, echoing back to her, sounding so much fainter than he’d intended.

“I… yeah.” Allison scowls. “What?”

“You’re breathing funny.”

“Oh, so you’re listening to my breathing?”

“Well yes, Allison, we’re in a confined space. It’s kind of impossible not to.”

Allison huffs.

She decides not to answer him, and he lets her. 

They crawl for a while, listening to the ambient rumble of the hotel around them, trembling in so specific and familiar a pattern, that it’s as though the building itself is breathing. 

“We shouldn’t have done it,” she blurts out. “Killed her, I mean.”

Five sighs, knowing who she’s referring to. “It’s fine.” 

“No, it isn’t. It’s… I thought I was done with that sort of thing. I went out to California to be _done_ with it, and...” 

And it came with her. That vicious urge to reach out and tear a person’s hair from their head, or kick their knees inside-out, or punch their teeth loose, that urge that would possess her sometimes, not just to attack, but to _hurt._ It came with her, and she’d swallowed it as best as she could, had done everything in her power not to indulge it, had only accepted roles in films without a shred of action. 

And it had waited in her, like a dormant sort of cancer, until she’d come home, and it had finally metastasized and spilled out of her during that fight with the hitmen, when she’d realized she didn’t just want to defeat the woman she was boxing with, she’d wanted her to hurt badly enough to lay hands on her. 

“And now we’re right back where we started?”

“Yeah.” 

“Well,” Five grunts, shimmying up a shaft that’ll lead them up a floor. “Just think of it as self-defense. It’s okay, Allison. You’re forgiven.”

Allison thinks back, to the fight. To the way her boot had crunched into the woman’s neck, to the terrible smile that had crawled across Allison’s face as she’d heard that familiar popping sound, her blood roaring pleasurably in her ears at the realization that she had _won._

“It wasn’t, though. Not completely.” 

She digs her toes into the sides of the shaft, and accepts Five’s thin, long-fingered hand when it finds her. She can’t really see more than his vague outline, a shadow slightly darker than the darkness they’re in. She’s glad.

“Did you ever enjoy it?” she asks, when she’s pressed her knees into the metal. “The killing.” 

Five’s quiet for a moment.

“You shouldn’t feel guilty,” he says, his voice a little choked, “There’s no shame in finding satisfaction in killing someone who’s trying to kill you.” 

“But you do feel it. The shame.”

“I’ve done a lot of horrible things, Allison. I did them all to get back to our family, but I… But there were these _moments,_ where I’d find myself… where I’d _lose_ myself.”

He is thinking, of course, of the bunker. Of spraying the board of bastards who’d made him into who he is into a fine red mist, of the little fish digesting in his gut. 

He’s also thinking of something else. 

“I’d just… get caught up in it and I’d feel myself _slipping.”_

She thinks she knows what he’s talking about. She’d feel those moments on missions, when she’d be in the thick of a fight, or an enhanced interrogation session, when her blood would purr in her chest and she’d find herself starting to _like_ what she was doing. The moments came and went, quick as lightning, but like lightning, they left their ghosts in the form of scars where they’d touched down.

“Alright,” she says. “Tell me one. Tell me the worst one. The worst thing you’ve ever done on a mission, that you ended up liking. The worst time you slipped. Tell me, and let’s get it out in the open.”

He can’t. He won’t. 

She accepts his silence.

They crawl in silence for a while, and every now and again, the thrumming of distant conversation rolls like a distant peal of thunder down their cramped tunnel. Echoes of laughter, hissed threats, a boom of conversation too muddled to make out.

And a high, warbling wail, from a vent that casts a few thin lines of greenish light across their dusty path.

It’s a baby.

Five feels his hair stand on end, shaking his head like a dog might, as if doing so would dislodge the effect of the sound on him, the idea that somehow, a _baby_ had been made and carried and born here, in the worst of places.

And then he stops.

Behind him, Allison has frozen up. He can no longer hear the soft thumps of her hands and knees and toes clunking against the metal. 

Five stops, and turns, listening to Allison’s breathing shift, to the way her thighs thump softly on the metal as she leans back and sits on her heels, her shoulders brushing against the ceiling. 

A soft, shuddering sigh.

She’s crying. 

Five scoots back towards her, dragging back over his knees to change directions, to get close enough to see the greenish shade of her in the little light they’ve been provided. Her eyes catch more light than they should, glittering like glass, and he knows why.

There’s a soft murmur leaking up from the vent, a man’s voice, one rough around the edges, clearly unused to cooing in the way that it is, but earnestly trying as hard as it can.

“I know that voice,” Allison whispers.

“Yeah?”

“It’s the Murder Magician.” 

“The _who?”_

“He was this crazy bomber. Blew up a hospital. We chased him all the way back to his hideout at this closed-down theatre in Bricktown. The Regent, you hear of it?”

“Doesn’t ring a bell.”

“Well, we’d broken in, and we’d chased him backstage, but he pulled this tripwire and a trapdoor in the stage floor opened up, and it sent us all into the basement. I hit my head really bad. Luther says I nearly _died._ Or… or is that how it went here? Since Vanya would’ve been on that mission with us?”

Five doesn’t answer.

Vanya, of all people, had gone on that mission in this world, and he still hadn’t. He hadn't been there again, and that's one more member of his family who'd been in the line of fire because of it. 

“I missed so _much,”_ he says. She can tell that he’s trying to laugh, to shrug it off his shoulders, but he’s choking on it.

“It’s okay,” she tries, “It’s--”

The baby’s crying again. The baby’s crying, and Allison’s body isn’t aching in the way that it ought to. She’s reminded again, of why. This body never had a child, this body doesn’t _understand._

“I miss her,” Allison sighs. “I miss her so much, and she’s gone, and I can’t ever get her back. I can’t even _try_ to.”

“Don’t say that--”

“No,” she interjects firmly. “No, Five, I _can’t._ I said I wouldn’t use it for that anymore, and I meant it.”

Five’s heart drops into his gut.

And he gets it. He gets how Allison had gone about making Claire now.

It’d been lurking in the back of his mind, the subtle sort of knowledge that what she had been doing with all of her lovers out in Hollywood hadn’t exactly been willing on their parts. But it’d mattered little to him, to his mission of saving the world, so he’d been content to ignore it. Far be it from him to judge his sister’s indiscretions, he’d thought; he’s done awful things to plug up that hole inside of him too.

Now, though...

He must have breathed funny. Must have tensed. Because Allison’s recoiling, whispering, “I’m terrible.”

He and Allison are similar in that way, he realizes, in how the two of them had gone off into the world, and done it all, with everyone but the only ones they’d actually wanted to do it with. And, well, in that much of what they’d done to those people they’d met had been coerced from them. For Five, it had been business. For Allison, it had been love. Same difference, in his book. Same effect. Same trail of harm they’d left in their respective wakes. 

“We both are.”

Allison frowns, not that Five can see it. “You’ve never…”

When Five had promised himself he would do whatever it takes to make it home, he had meant it.

“In my time at the Commission, I’ve done everything, Allison. And when I say everything, I mean _everything._ You don’t need to be afraid of anything I’ll think of you. Because trust me when I say, I’ve been there too.”

Allison bows her head.

“Dress it up, if you like, or don’t,” Five continues, “It makes no difference. And besides, Allison, that world is _gone._ Those people are still here, in this one, and you’ve never touched them. They can’t be hurt by something that never happened; they can’t remember it.”

“So why can _I?”_

Five sighs. “Time travel’s weird. Because of how we’ve jumped into the future, you and I and the rest of our family, we’re like… we’re like ghosts, of a world that doesn’t exist. You understand?”

She does. She supposes these memories of what she’s done, of the child she can never so much as attempt to make, because of the terribly unfair pain she would inflict on the man who is her father, is a weight she’s just going to have to carry. Her whole body’s a haunted house, so what’s one more ghost among the rest?

She doesn’t hug Five, but her shoulder nudges his. He nudges back. She can’t see him at all, but she gets the sense that he’s smiling.

But there’s one more thing weighing on her.

“Do you think that this, _all_ of this, might be my fault?” she asks quietly.

She’s referring, of course, to everything. To Claire not existing at all. To Vanya being lost in the depths of this strange hell they’ve fed themselves to. To Five, still jumping. To Luther, still twisted and pained. To all of them, and the scars they don’t remember, and the lives they still lead.

“Allison,” Five replies, “What would make you even _think_ that?”

She’s quiet for a moment.

“At that dinner, with Dad, I…” She draws in a breath, summoning her words. “I think I should have rumored him.” 

It wouldn’t have worked. But she should have tried.

“Allison…”

“No, I… I thought about it. I _did._ I _thought_ about doing it. But I…”

She can’t finish, biting down on her lip and digging her teeth into it. 

“It was him,” Five says urgently. “It was him all along. Not you, not Luther, not me, not Vanya. Sure, each and every one of us had a hand in kicking that snowball down the mountain, but Dad was the one who made it in the first place. We can’t let him do this to us anymore. Not when we know that he’d have done it all anyway. Trust me when I say it won’t have mattered.”

Allison shudders at his words. Oh, it wouldn’t have mattered alright, but not for the reasons he’s thinking.

“Now come on,” Five urges, “Dry your eyes, and let’s keep moving.”

He unsticks his palms from the floor, and starts shuffling ahead of her.

She follows.

All her ghosts are haunting her right now, it seems, and this last one, this one she’s buried almost as deeply as that night in the basement with Vanya, has been awakened. She shoves it down, unable to exorcise it, but quite determined to do as Five has recommended, and set it aside for a while. She has a sister in need of rescuing, she has brothers in need of reuniting, and she has to get the fuck out of here.

But she still thinks about it, for a moment.

When Allison had been eight, she’d tried to use the rumor on Dad for the first and last time. She’d wanted a dollhouse, a pretty old-fashioned one that was white, with a pink roof and an elevator. So, having been raised to be quite clear about the things she wants, she’d gone skipping up to Dad to demand it from him, to **hear a rumor that you gave me a dollhouse.**

She didn’t get it. Instead, she got dragged by her hair down the hall and into the bathroom, where she’d had her tongue scrubbed with pine-flavored soap, and then spent a cold, sleepless night and day locked in the woodshed on the roof without anything to eat or drink, and with so little room she had no choice but to stand the entire time. 

It hadn’t been the punishment that scared her. It’d been what had happened right before it.

Dad’s eyes hadn’t turned to milky glass. They’d remained black as night, rolling down to fix her with a petrifyingly intense glare through the moon of his monocle, a glare so ferocious that if Allison had not known better, she’d think she had stumbled across some ancient, unknowable secret that might destroy the world.

Years later, she simply cannot explain why her rumor had failed her, why it’d been as though she hadn’t used her power at all.

It remains the most terrifying thing Allison has ever seen.

* * *

In Klaus's opinion, the day that Dr. Terminal had cemented himself in his mind as utterly monstrous was the day he'd broken into the City Zoo.

Dr. Terminal’s whole thing was that he ate and ate and ate, sucking anything and everything into the black-hole like portal at the center of his gut, some sort of strange starlike oven where he broke matter down into atoms so he might consume it. 

And, sure, he could rip up a city street or a strip of trees at the edge of Morrison Park, and Klaus never really gave much of a damn; streets can be repaved, and given their own city’s garbage infrastructure system, frankly, Doctor T was a nice slap on the wrist to the city council to kindly get on with it, and trees could be replanted. It’d take a damn long time for them to regrow to that most attractive of heights and leafinesses that trees of a certain age attain, but it can’t be helped.

And sure, he’d almost sucked Allison into his tummy-oven that one time when they were fourteen, and that had really terrified everyone for about a minute, but she’d been just _fine_ in the end, and had led to some especially gushy canoodling on Luther’s part on the long drive back, so Klaus had decided to strip the numbing terror from that particular memory and smother it in a balm of disaffected humor.

But the Zoo? Oh no. Absolutely not.

Because the thing is, Klaus actually likes the Zoo. He’d liked it since he’d first gone, on that special press tour the Academy attended, when they’d gone to some fundraiser or another and had gotten to meet the animals, and he’s liked it ever since, keeping up the habit of going every few months well after he’d left the house. It’s a lot of fun, being absolutely off your shits in a wallaby yard, and outrunning both Dundee the horny alpha male wallaroo and the absolutely terrified teenage zookeepers tasked with keeping idiots like himself from jumping the fence (which, to be fair, he’d only ever done like, twice).

So when Dr. Terminal had gone floating above the Safari World exhibit like a blimp that'd broken loose from Hell, vacuuming up all three hyenas, half the turf of the mixed-species exhibit and Tippy the giraffe, well. He had taken it very personally.

Especially because of Tippy. Klaus had really liked that giraffe. On that tour of the zoo they’d gotten, good, sweet Tippy had been a teetering newborn, nearly as gangly as the flock of teenagers who gushed over him. They’d been handed special crackers, and told to pose for the cameras as Tippy slurped them from their hands with his big, velvety lips, and Klaus’s mask had been knocked loose by his long, whiplike gray-blue tongue. He’d made the front page. 

The point is, that he was a good boy, aside from being intrinsically linked to one of the few happy memories Klaus has of his childhood, and he didn’t deserve to get crunched up like a tin can and squeezed into an opening as wide across as that of a blender. 

It had been the only time Klaus had really put his back into a mission, and it had been the day the Academy had subdued the awful doctor and sent him packing on a trip to what Klaus now realizes had been Hotel Oblivion all along.

And so, here they are. 

It’s been years since Klaus has seen him, and he’s gotta say, the guy’s aging like milk. 

The doc had never been especially mobile before, but he’s confined to a corner of this… well, calling it a _throne room_ is a little too cultish for Klaus’s liking, but it’s really the only way to describe why exactly he’s seated on a dais made of haphazardly-repurposed hotel furniture. He’s sitting there, round and limp and with his face sagging like an especially inbred bulldog, the kind that would win best in show. 

He supposes it makes sense that Dr. T would be up there. From what he’s gathered, Hotel Oblivion is something of a no-man’s-land, and in tense survival situations, people tend to follow the guy holding the biggest stick. Or the biggest interdimensional cosmic destruction device. Whatever that is; Luther should know, he should ask him later. 

Supposedly, the doctor had been some sort of physicist at the university, and for whatever reason that motivates professors to go absolutely off the fucking wall and plot mass murder (Ben had posited once that it was probably some tenure dispute that got especially personal, but Klaus isn’t totally sure if that’s all of it. Some of it, definitely, but not all), he’d fused his experimental whirligig with his own body. 

Said whirligig is… well, something’s _wrong_ with it.

It’s hot, so hot that sweat’s slicking up the inside of his suit, and sticking his hair to the back of his neck, and probably making Ben regret that he hadn’t shaved that patchy stache before they’d televated to hell. He remembers this heat, but something about it is underwhelming.

And what’s more, the pull of the gravity is off. It’d been shocking enough when they’d been dragged in, but now, he doesn’t feel it the way he used to; the walls aren’t scraping down to bow in his presence, the furniture isn’t sliding towards him as though the room were tilted at an odd angle. It’s hardly there at all.

And the light.

When they were young, the light from the core of Dr. Terminal’s cosmic tummy-tum-tum had been blindingly white, so bright that it had warranted the invention of a special set of goggles by his father, so each of the children might hope to face off against him without having their pupils scorched right off. 

Now, it’s dull and reddish, bright only in the way that the core of a campfire is bright. Sure, his eyes are stinging, but they aren’t exactly melting into uncooked egg whites and drizzling from his eye sockets. 

_Or maybe that’s it,_ Klaus supposes. _Maybe that’s why so many people are following him. I’d probably revert back to my caveman instincts and start worshipping fire if I were stuck here for years._

He wants to lean over to Ben to ask him about it, but he gets the sense that it won’t exactly do him any favors. With anyone.

Ben, for what it’s worth, has his attention occupied by a clearly-dead person lying in the corner, whose ghost, as far as Klaus can see, doesn’t seem to be present. Ben’s wondering how he’d died, what had lead to the gaping hole in his skull, so wide it’s made his alarmingly blue eyes stare ahead, so far apart. He’s wondering what strange dreams might be worming through it. 

He has also gathered that this fellow, whoever he is or was, is on the menu ahead of them. That something has changed in Dr. Terminal, something that’s made it too difficult to ingest massive meals. 

And that this group of people who’ve abducted him are totally cool with killing and feeding people to their god-king, which is absolutely _fantastic_ for them, of course. 

A few people are mingling about, whispering quietly in the old doctor’s graying ear, dropping Vanya's violin case unceremoniously on the floor at his feet, and Klaus squints.

“... is that Night Hag?”

“Who?”

“She was one of my fangirls.” 

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, I’m telling you, that’s _her._ Oh! And the guy next to her, that’s the Sequin Skull!”

Said Sequin Skull twists his head back and leers at them.

“Guess he’s one of yours,” Ben mutters. 

“Mine? Come on, he’s totally yours. I’ll bet he bedazzled that rip right in the middle of your head.”

“How would that even work?”

“I dunno, ask Allison. She was the one who always put rhinestones on shit.”

Probably-Night-Hag and Sequin Skull are coming up to them, and the brothers decide to shut themselves up.

Ben clenches his jaw, and drops his gaze to the floor. He's been alive for less than a day, and it's over again; he wants to laugh, to cry, to scream and rip his hair out.

Klaus takes another look at that dull red sun pulsing in the doctor’s belly, flickering like a dying…

Oh. That’s it, isn’t it?

He’s _dying._

Klaus feels a little spike of vindication; well, they’ll still die, but--

But, they’re being dragged down the hall, away from their old nemesis. 

And then they’re alone, with nothing but the lethargic movement of the curtains as company. Realizing that they’re not going to die just now, but will probably die in a few hours tops, they moan aloud from pure relief. 

Klaus squeezes his eyes tight, and then opens them again, better able to see in the dim light streaming from a window. The room they’re in is empty of all furniture, and the air is heavy with the musty stink of decay. His mouth tastes like bile, and he licks his cracked lips wearily.

He sighs, reluctant to rouse himself. His body feels like lead, cold and stiff, and his arms are tied so tightly that he’s starting to lose bloodflow. Klaus knows this particular knot that’s binding him, the one that relies on one central point of pressure and he twitches his arms once, twice, three times, before flopping limply against the side of the wall. 

He turns, to peer down at where Ben’s been dropped, flat on his back. 

Ben’s face is bone white, and Klaus moves to speak, but then Ben’s turning over to bundle in on himself, squirming from his back to his side to his belly to his knees.

A full-body shudder possesses him, and Klaus’s gut twitches empathetically. He knows exactly what’s happening here, and an awful part of him is truly relieved to know that he is not to blame for it. 

And the retching. A new, fresh, sickly scent to layer over all the others. 

Ben’s nausea is back, so therefore so must be the creatures, twisting and needling at the inside of his own belly, spurred by the spike of adrenaline he’s coasting on. He’s right back where he’d started, and the old misery of his body is awfully _new_ again.

Klaus regards it calmly, without so much as a shiver of aversion, and then leans over. He doesn’t have a free hand to help him out with, so he opts to use his forehead, nuzzling wide, sloppy circles across the center of Ben’s back, feeling pretty stupid for the way this must look. But it's a little thing that helps, so he does it. Ben had done something similar to him. He’d lose his hold on himself, keeling over a toilet in a bar or a club, and an electrical chill would pass through him, stemming from the spot in the center of his back where Ben would be touching him. He always knew exactly how to look after him, and, well. Maybe that's part of the problem, that much of the care they'd exchanged had been one-way.

After a moment, Ben settles down, rolling away from the pool of sick beside his head, and Klaus awkwardly scoots along the wall to give him that room, tugging at his knots with quick, sawlike movements of his thin wrists.

It’s quiet for a while. Klaus is tugging at his knots, and Ben stares at the greenish stripe of light under the door, reaching out with a booted toe to bathe it in a slightly brighter pane of starlight that scrapes across the floor, reflected from the window. 

And slowly, inevitably, they turn to the elephant in the room. It’s just the two of them now, just Ben and Klaus and their mess, stinking everything up.

They could die, after all. They could _die,_ and Klaus doesn’t want that to happen while they’re so cold to each other. His life’s been a fucking waste, and he wants at least one thing to go right, should this really be it.

“What’s different?” Klaus wonders, brimming with a storm of emotions. “What’s happened between us? We had _fun_ for so long and now it’s all just… Where’d all that _go?”_

 _Down the gutter in Dallas,_ they both think.

“Klaus,” Ben says, “I’m _alive_ now.”

“And that changes things?”

“It changes everything. I can… I can go places on my own, and I can talk to people, and I can eat, and sleep and _touch_ things.” 

“So you don’t need me anymore, is what you’re saying. You were just with me because you didn’t have any other option.”

Ben’s face twists up. “No. No, that’s not what I’m saying at _all.”_

“Then what--”

“--I didn’t _want_ to go. Because I wasn’t ready to die. I wanted to stay, to _be_ with you all. With _you.”_

“Because you love me.” 

There. A quiet acknowledgement of what this is.

Ben’s quiet for a moment.

“It’s alright,” he finally says, “If you don’t feel the same--”

“Well what makes you think that?” 

Ben freezes, staring up at him.

It spilled out of him unintentionally, but he doesn’t regret it. 

Maybe it’s that existential sort of confidence one gets when one’s facing down death, or maybe it’s just that the moment has finally slid into place. Whatever it is, Klaus finally lets himself feel for the first time, all of it, the sum of twelve years of constant, steady companionship. He opens up the floodgates, and lets it hurt, and lets it bloom in him, and when it’s all said and done, he looks down at where Ben’s head is less than an inch from his thigh, and he admits it to himself, exactly what this is that’s been hovering between them. 

_Yeah,_ he thinks. _Love’s nice, isn’t it?_

Ben, caught in the eyewall of his own internal storm, shifts uncomfortably. “I shouldn’t have blamed you for it.” He’s referring, of course, to the landmine-ridden subject of how he had died. “For… _you know._ It was just a big, messy accident and I just… I wanted to hurt you, is all. I wanted to make you mad at me.” 

Anger flares in Klaus like a lightning strike.

“Well, then what the hell was all of that at the _house?_ Why do you _keep_ ignoring me?”

“Oh, like how you ignore me whenever you feel like it?”

Klaus winces. Tugs sharply at his bindings. 

“I’m doing it because I’m not here to hold your hand anymore, Klaus. You want your fucking boundaries, well, there they are. I’m putting them up. You don’t want me to _watch?”_

Klaus flinches, digging his wrists into the taut fabric, wanting the numbness to flare up just a little bit more, to distract from another pain stabbing in his chest.

“Well here I am, turning away,” Ben continues, pointedly shifting on his side. 

“Don’t--”

“No, listen, Klaus: You want to get better, you _have_ to help yourself. Ask for a hand and I’ll give it, but don’t sit around waiting for me to save you, because you know as well as I do that I’m no fucking good at that. We’ve tried that shit for years, and it’s gotten us nowhere but here.”

He has a point. They prop each other up and tear each other down, but all the progress they’ve gotten is minuscule. They were a wheel, turning around and around and around in the mud, and now, they’ve finally popped loose of it.

Klaus sighs.

This thing they have, this odd cosmic binding that’s tied the two of them together, it hadn’t exactly been perfect. It’d taken one too many detours into a quagmire of dysfunction. But it’s one of the best things he’s ever had, it’s something that, now that he thinks about it, might be _good,_ if they apply a little time, if they let this new life they’ve landed in have a little space to figure itself out. 

Some things can stay, after all.

“Are you saying you want to leave?”

“What?”

“Because I…” Klaus chokes on the words a bit, but he keeps going. He’s found a loose corner of the loop of this knot he’s untangling, and he starts tugging, and it starts to _give._

“I don’t want you to go,” Klaus admits. “I _never_ did, and I don’t now. I want you to be with me always.”

Ben shifts, smiling sadly. "I want that too."

“Of course,” he adds. “We get it together, right before we die. This is gonna be my _second_ time. I hate this.”

They laugh, each quietly coming to the same conclusion; they aren’t forgiving each other, so much as they are forgiving themselves.

It’s quiet again, but the silence is warm and settled.

There’s a sudden release of tension at his wrists, a slide of fabric over bruised skin, the rush of blood returning to its old, familiar paths beneath his skin with a prickling tingle. He's not free yet, but he will be soon.

“Promise me something?” he says, extending a hand.

Ben looks to him, half-guarded, half-hopeful. 

“We live through this, and we don’t look back?”

Ben draws in a slow, soft breath. Then he smiles. “Deal.”

* * *

Sir Reginald Hargreeves had believed strongly in the power of the collective, or perhaps, in the power the _promise_ of it had in suppressing the individuality of his wards. The students of the inaugural class of the Umbrella Academy had thus been trained to think of themselves as a singular organism, as a collection of limbs and organs working in unison, bound by a common purpose, that of ensuring the survival of the group. 

Each child had known his or her place within that organism, and to never stray from it.

Needless to say, this thought experiment had failed miserably.

The organism had been at war with itself, had stretched itself this way and that until it had come undone and shattered into fragments. It’d been inevitable, Diego knows; how can any organism survive without a heart? 

(Allison, he knows, had been assigned that role. He’s pretty sure it’s mostly due to her being the only girl in the group. And, much to her credit, she’d balked it immediately; Allison, who could care less about defusing the spats her brothers leapt into, which she participated in quite often, is hardly the soft, feeling core of the team. No wonder they’d schismed.)

At the time, Diego had thought it was a crisis of leadership that had done them in. That Luther had failed miserably in his role as Number One. That he’d lacked the backbone necessary to keep the group together after Ben died and they suddenly realized just how fallible they all were. 

He’d made it about himself. He has enough humility to admit that, at least to himself; he’d taken that mess, and had warped it in his mind, until it was all about _him,_ and how he, Diego, Number Two, would swoop in and save the team, revealing some eleventh hour knack for binding them all to a task and guiding them forward.

He didn’t, and it made him so angry.

And then years went by, and the family came back together to bury the old man, and he waited for it to appear, and then it didn’t. And it made him so _angry._

It’s all he ever thought he’d wanted, and when he’d had it, just a few days ago in Dallas, he’d watched it explode in his face. He’d been a dog, chasing a car, and now that he had the bumper in his jaws, he simply had no idea what to do with it. He hadn't ever thought any further.

And that’s the thing: it’s what he _thought_ he wanted. Because someone had placed that thought in his head and nurtured it as lovingly as one might nurture a garden, that leadership is owed to him, that it is something he must want, that he cannot be anything other than first and best, that playing second fiddle is only for the weak. 

Because the thing is, Diego fucking hated leadership. He hated it and he _knows_ he hated it, and how it made him stressed-out and snappish. Well, more snappish than usual. 

Which leaves him with this problem he’s currently staring down, as he watches Luther peer out the window of the pool at the star-stained desert: this thing he’s wanted his entire life isn’t for him. It’s _wrong_ for him, it’s been _imposed_ upon him, this idea that he would never be _good_ if he wasn't _great,_ and he had let it go.

And now, free of the weight of it, of the weight of the anger that had driven him, he’s floating, directionless, unsure of where he’s headed. 

And he’s unsure of how to talk to Luther at all. 

They’ve never gotten along. It’s no secret. They’ve always been at each others’ throats, Diego striking first and last and Luther retaliating, and it’d all been over this position that Diego doesn’t want anymore.

They might be friends, someday. Just not yet. There’s a lot of bad blood between them that needs to drain away, and now, with Luther at the end of his rope, is probably not the time for it. 

“We’re not on Earth,” Luther says out of nowhere, shaking Diego from his reverie.

“What?”

“We’re not on Earth,” he repeats tensely, practically spitting the words out, but the anger radiating from him isn’t directed at Diego, and both of them are very aware of that. “We’re in space.”

“How do you know _that?”_

“I’ve been there.” 

Luther gets it now, why it’s so preternaturally quiet. Why there are so few windows on the ground floor, why the walls would need to self-heal, why the whole place seems to hang in a space of perpetual twilight. Why he can see the stars so clearly, from this filthy window he’s scrubbed eyeholes into.

“Well then where the hell _are_ we?”

“Some sort of pocket dimension, maybe,” Luther thinks aloud, and as soon as the idea’s left his lips, he corrects it in his head; these stars are familiar, the very ones he’s seen in the night sky from the observatory on the mansion rooftop. “Actually, our solar system, or somewhere close enough to it to matter. So at least we’re in the neighborhood.”

“Oh,” replies Diego after a while. “Well. I guess that knocks walking out the front door. Or any of these windows.” 

“Yeah,” Luther grumbles, and they keep walking, as Luther scratches away on a rudimentary map he’s been making on the back of one of those pamphlets from the lobby. 

They’ve discovered that only some parts of Hotel Oblivion are freakishly civil, like a false smile baring too many brightly-bleached teeth. Some have descended into absolute bedlam, some, like the Hotel’s spa, which they’re passing into now, seem to have surpassed even that. It seems like they’re walking into the aftermath of some battle that’d broken out years ago, judging by the state of decay in the body slung over a towel rack they’re passing, that Diego is too mistrustful to assume hadn’t been ritualistically sacrificed, given the very ominous-looking symbols carved on the wall behind him.

“So. There are cults here too. That’s great.” His words boom off the cracked tile. 

Luther doesn’t respond to him at all. He doesn’t laugh, or sigh indulgently, or even whip around to tell Diego to kindly shut up. He just passes through the dim silvery glow cast by the stars in the dingy windows, silent as a ghost.

Something’s wrong with him. Something’s _really_ wrong with him, and Diego doesn’t quite know how to approach this.

Playing second fiddle isn’t something he’s used to. He feels like a weight’s been lifted off his shoulders, following his brother’s lead instead of trying to drag him along after him, but he still feels disquieted by his doing so, like he’s expecting Dad to pop out from around the corner and sneer at him for his weakness.

 _It isn’t weakness,_ though, he’s realizing. If anything, he’s unburdened, and as a result, in an opportune position to call Luther on his shit.

So, when they’ve dawdled enough in a locker room so overgrown with luminous mold that he’s fairly certain he’s going to be sneezing spores when he leaves this place, he does so.

He starts small, with something little and petty enough to not have too many stakes at play; Diego’s butted heads with Luther more times than he can count, but this time will be different, and he needs to dip his toe in before he jumps in headfirst. 

So, something little and petty, like “Look, if you don’t fucking share the baby powder, I’m gonna have to fight you for it.”

Luther, who has half-unzipped his uniform to pour the stuff into his armpits, looks up with the dull, vaguely-annoyed expression of a bear, fresh out of hibernation. “I’m almost done.”

“Well, can you hurry up?”

Luther huffs, and tosses the canister right at Diego. A cloud of filmy powder explodes in his face when he catches it, and Diego’s too busy coughing it up to see the way Luther’s stiff lip softens into a teasing smile.

Diego makes serious work of the powder, pouring the stuff down the back of his collar.

“I forgot how much these fucking suits chafe.”

“I never wanted to say anything before,” admits Luther. “But I really do hate them.” 

“Why the fuck didn’t we powder these things before we put them on, huh?”

“Well, I did, actually. I’m just refilling.”

 _Gee, thanks._ “Had to rub it in, huh?”

“You do make it so easy.”

Diego’s laughing, when they turn the corner, staring down into a hollowed-out space, green with moss, that had once been a pool, lined with decorative potted topiaries that’d long since withered into husks; Luther pauses and runs the edge of a gentle finger along one brittle branch, frowning. Diego’s laugh bounces off the tile, rolling down the hall in echoes upon echoes, and in hindsight, he definitely should’ve been more cautious with it. 

Maybe if he had, she wouldn’t have found them so quickly. 

Or maybe it doesn’t matter at all; Lila, who’d stepped out onto the ground floor of Hotel Oblivion without a map of the place, had instead opted for a compass, in the form of picking a direction, walking blindly, and waiting until that strange, internal force of gravity that takes hold of her whenever she’s in range of something she can mimic takes hold.

It had, and Lila had let it settle over her like the embrace of an old friend. She’d let it guide her, playing a grim sort of game of hot-or-cold, letting it tug her along, reaching out and squeezing doorknobs until they went soft as dough between her fingers to discover that she was on the trail of Luther, folding a leaflet advertising _Hotel Oblivion Amateur Jazz Night_ (oh, _there’s_ a nightmare, no wonder these people had gone so mad) off the floor into a rudimentary paper plane, and making it turn a sharp ninety-degree angle down the hall to prove that Diego was in range as well. 

To her infinite disappointment, they had been all her little experiments had yielded.

But, beggars can’t be choosers, and two is better than none. So Lila had contented herself with them, and had taken to the trail like a scenthound. 

By the time Luther and Diego have crossed the enormous room, and are feeding themselves into the mouth of the hall that will connect them back to the Hotel proper, a slender, knifelike shadow is stealing across the floor, from somewhere around the corner.

Diego sees it first, snatching Luther by the arm and pointing. 

A flash of movement, a swift, slender shape racing across the doorway, making a mad dash for…

Diego hears a scuff, the sound of a rubber sole squeaking against old tile, and he slowly looks up, at the balcony overlooking the pool, at the thin figure perched on the edge of it, haunches raised like a gargoyle, poised to take flight.

He recognizes her instantly.

“Oh,” he sighs. “Hey you.” 

“Didn’t you time travel?” blurts out Luther.

Lila scoffs. It’s too dark to make out her face, only the inky shape of her. 

“Where’s Number Five?” she asks, and the very air trembles at her tone.

Luther and Diego don’t exchange a word, nor a glance. They don’t need to. The scattered, furious energy roiling off of her in waves is enough for them to discern exactly what she intends to do when she finds him.

Needless to say, they can’t let that happen. 

“No idea,” replies Diego truthfully, not that it matters.

“Your brother did something terrible,” she says, each word measured and slow, buoyed by a strange state of absolute calm that terrifies Diego far more than if she’d been spitting at him. “Something positively monstrous. And I have to repay him in kind.”

She’ll kill him first. That she knows for certain. She’ll kill Number Five, and then she’ll come back for the rest. She’ll kill Number Five, she’ll bloody herself all the way up to the elbows with him, and she’ll make it last for _days,_ and then she’ll be back for the rest of them; they had killed her employers, had ruined her life, and since killing is always personal, she knows for a fact that they must have loved it.

“Are the rest of you just as terrible?” she wonders, watching the brothers below her _twitch._ Oh, she’s found a nerve. Now to dig at it, to pluck at it until it _sings._

They had ruined her life, but none so completely as Five had, and they will certainly come for her once they see what she’ll have done to him. Therefore, they must die too, but she’s open to negotiation on how painful she’ll make it for the rest of them. “Tell me where he is, and I’ll make it quick for the rest of you.”

“That’s not a great sell,” says Luther.

“It’s the one I’m offering,” Lila replies. “It’s the truth. I think we’ve gotten as far as we could with lying to each other, right Diego? I’m being _forthcoming,_ this time, you should be proud of me! See how acquainted we’ve become?”

Luther glances questioningly at Diego, who grimaces, shrugging a little sheepishly. “Yeah, I buy it.”

“Look,” growls Luther. “We don’t know where Five is, and even if we did, it wouldn’t matter. You’re not getting to him through us.”

Lila’s voice drops, hovering just above a whisper. “Then you’re no different from him, are you? Don’t say I didn’t try with you.”

It’s quiet for a moment, and Diego knows exactly what she’s doing; she’s gathering herself, gathering an insult, one she’s been holding onto for a minute or two now, one she knows is going to cut like nothing else. He draws in a hissing breath through his teeth. 

“It doesn’t _have_ to hurt, you know. I’m not very gentle, I’ll admit, but I can try. I’m turning over a new leaf, after all.” Her teeth flash in the dim silvery light. “Though it really was so much _fun,_ choking your girlfriend out--”

Luther snatches the potted husk of plant nearest to him, and sends it hurtling towards her head.

It… stops. Dead in the center of the air, and launches its way meteorically back towards them.

Luther and Diego dive apart, and Diego skids on the very edge of what he’s realizing is the pool, thumping ten feet down into the dried-out swampish deep end, the can of baby powder kicking into his chest where he’s landed on it.

A shower of pottery shards rains down on him from above, and he gasps raggedly. His head is spinning, and it’s not from the impact. 

_How’d she do that?_ Diego is wondering. _Whose power is_ that _supposed to be? Is there another one of us here?_

Above him, Lila’s leapt down at Luther, who has caught her by the front of her jacket and is holding her like a quarrelsome kitten, her feet kicking at the air. 

A clawed hand is slashing right in front of his face, close enough for Luther to see the chipping black varnish coating her nails.

Lila jams a knee into his stomach, and as Luther doubles over, she is at last close enough to drive her forehead into his own. His grip loosens, and she twists free, reaching down with her toe to kick off of a nearby table, to give herself the boost she’ll need to leap onto his shoulders and twist at his head.

But it doesn’t work.

Instead, Lila’s foot passes through the table as easily as if it were made of paper, and she goes crashing through it, through the wall, denting a hole in the concrete floor.

Lila blinks quickly, gaping like a fish, dragging herself up to her feet, and leaving thin grooves in the floor from her fingers.

She’s not light anymore, she realizes; she can’t just leap off of things the way she is accustomed to, not while using Luther’s power. She is devastatingly strong, but it flows from her without pause, without exception, without precision, and she’s clumsily tearing holes into everything, caving through it all, even the things she had never meant to break.

Livid, Lila springs to her feet, pouncing through the shrinking hole in the wall, and launches herself back at Luther, who catches her again, swinging her around, tearing grooves into the floor and wall with her feet as she throws her legs out and tries to work the momentum in her favor. She cranes her neck out, finding his wrist, and tears into it with her teeth. 

Luther cries out, and then the world goes white.

Diego has sent the canister of baby powder looping around the top of the pool, and it explodes in a plush white cloud in Lila’s face. Luther and Lila break apart, coughing and wiping at their teary eyes, and it’s enough time for Diego to race up and out of the pool, gathering a knife to send slicing through Lila’s jacket, pinning her by the fabric into the wall.

He crunches through the snowy layer of powder on the floor, drawing out another knife, and--

Freezes.

A pack of Hotel guests have heard their scuffle, have skulked in like a pack of coyotes amidst the fighting. 

One of them has a strange, heavy device that Lila tilts her head at in confusion. Luther, who’d been on the receiving end of one such device only days ago, albeit a device that hadn’t been fashioned out of salvaged piping, recognizes it immediately as a makeshift machine gun. It’s ridiculous-looking, but the people trapped here have had nothing but time on their hands _(Well,_ he thinks, _at least they were being productive)_ , and he expects they would not point such a weapon at them if it was not expected to work.

He reaches for Diego, but it’ll take two seconds to leap off his knees and force his way in front of him, two seconds he does not have.

The room flashes with the firework-sputter of gunfire.

And Luther’s heart freezes, bracing for the burst of red mist, for the shattering of the tiles in front of him, for the grotesque twitching of a body, torn through with bullets.

It doesn’t happen. 

Diego stands firm, with his trembling hands splayed out in front of him, and not a single bullet has burrowed into the floor; they’re _floating,_ bobbing unsteadily, as if they were no lighter than the air they’re suspended in. 

Diego’s heaving quick, shallow breaths, and his arms feel weak and tender as though he’d been suspended by them from a thirteen-story window. 

He feels as though he’s tugging on the end of a rubber band, feeling the tension gather, and gather and _gather,_ and--

He lets go.

And the wall of bullets snap right back the way they’d come.

Diego’s knees go weak, and he crumples, gasping for a breath he can’t reach.

To his left, he vaguely registers the blank space in the wall, the puncture that’s shrinking spongily; Lila, in the midst of the chaos, had made a mad dash through the locker rooms, and is long gone. 

But the thing he’s really thinking about is right in front of him, the shards of pottery from the pot that had slung back right at them, the line of twisted, perforated bodies leaking blood out onto the floor. It runs through the grooves in the tile, trickling down the empty sides of the pool.

Luther’s scrambling to his feet behind him, has his powerful hands gently squeezing his shoulders, tugging him back onto his feet. 

“What _was_ that?” he’s saying, hushed, as if he's in awe.

 _It was me,_ Diego thinks, staring down at his trembling hands, swelling with something like wonder. _It was me the whole time._

* * *

Vanya hadn’t made it to the lobby.

That had been her intent, of course, but midway into her descent, when the bulb above the elevator door flashed warningly, indicating that someone below her had hailed the elevator, and it, true neutral steward of the Hotel that it was, had decided to stop for them.

Maybe, she supposes, it had been one of her siblings.

But she didn’t feel comfortable taking the chance then, leaping out on the eighth floor and sprinting away as though Hell were licking at her heels.

And she doesn’t regret it, even if she’s thoroughly winded as she descends the too-steep staircase. It’s cold enough to make her shiver uncontrollably in the thin fabric she’s wearing, and her fingers feel like ice; no amount of rubbing her hands together or burying them in her sleeves will warm them. And she’s so unsteady enough on her feet that the simple act of descending the stairs has her wheezing, clinging to the worn wooden balcony and stopping every few steps to make sure the world stops spinning; she still doesn’t regret refusing to eat, even if the consequences are bearing down on her like a tidal wave.

Now that she thinks of it, this isn’t exactly the best place to be. Twice already, she’s heard the urgent pattering of footsteps somewhere floors below her, and she’d go flying back into the corner of the landing, digging her shoulder blades into the wall.

No one’s come up this far yet, but it’ll happen. 

It’ll happen, and Vanya will be ready, because her power is back.

With that burst of adrenaline she’d received in fleeing from the elevator, it’d flooded through her, electrifying her cells, making her feel like a city returning back to life after a blackout, bright light rolling in a wavelike movement out to illuminate every window.

Her power is back, and… And she can use it, _can’t_ she? She might not be inclined to bring the entire stairwell down on her head, but she can certainly use it to narrow her search for her family.

So, Vanya draws in a deep breath, winding her fingers tightly around the banister for balance. She closes her eyes, finds her heartbeat, and then expands outwards, throwing out her hearing and shuddering, remembering that yes, in this world, her hearing is intact, and she has a range twice as large as she’d practiced with before. It’s enough to make her head pulse in bursts of dark color, so she has to make this quick.

For one, on this floor she’s passing, there is no one at all. Not a single heartbeat, not a single intake of breath. It’s as thought it’d been passed up completely by whoever is in charge of the Hotel, and Vanya has no idea why. And frankly, she'd rather not know. 

Below her, the soft rumbling of conversation; a babble of unfamiliar tones, jabbering away about planning a raid on the kitchens.

Vanya’s stomach growls traitorously, and she winces, pressing a hand to it. She has half a mind to join them, it seems. 

A baby crying, which Vanya disregards; It cannot help her escape. It's a trick of her mind, nothing more.

The rickety clatter of the elevator, ascending unsteadily, with something inside of it. The shrill wheels of a cart of some sort, and… God, what is that? Vanya cranes her neck, tries to focus, but no, she hasn’t misheard; there are strange, squelching footsteps in the elevator, but not a single breath or heartbeat. It’s as though there’s an android made of flesh inside of the elevator. 

Hearing it, whatever it is, fills Vanya with a shrill, excitable sense of dread, the urgent desire to never, ever run into whatever it is, to not run into it so badly she’d rather race down two flights of stairs and throw herself into the arms of what she judges to be a biker gang roaring and clashing in the hallway with Five and Allison--

Wait.

Yes, it’s _them._

It’s Allison’s smooth voice barking out supernatural orders, shrieking in so specific a pitch that Vanya instantly and instinctively knows that someone's pulling her hair. It's the electrical whizzing of space twisting around Five, the familiar skipping of a heart she’s held in her hands.

Vanya swells with an overpowering rush of longing. She feels their presence acutely, as a sort of warm shadow, ghostly, yet somehow keenly alive in a way no true person can ever be; they’re _here._

_They’re here, right below me, and they’re going to need my help._

Vanya starts running.

She reaches them in the midst of the fight. 

Vanya snatches the roar of the screams, and her power leaves her in a rolling wave.

The hall buckles, the walls and ceilings crushing outwards, then creaking back into place. The air itself begins to shiver, feathering in a strange pattern that brings her siblings skidding out of the throng of the crowd and diving to the floor, not because they’ve fallen, but because they’re determined _not_ to fall. Because they _know_ this attack, and they know who’d set it loose.

They look back, in the direction from which the burst of energy had come, and there she is.

Vanya stands before them, small and slim and fierce. Her eyes flicker with white fire, and her skin glows hauntingly, for just a moment, as she scrutinizes the hallway coldly.

Then, she blinks, and her eyes have returned to their doeish brown, and her skin has gone from bright to sallow.

She looks frighteningly thin, her face sharp enough for the bones to poke through, and she’s swaying a little when she takes a single step forward. There are deep, purplish shadows beneath her eyes, and her hair’s shorter than Allison’s seen it, sagging down to her chin but no further; it’s dark brown again, as well. Vanya, they conclude, has been changed physically by this timeline too.

Physically, but not mentally.

Vanya drags in a jagged breath upon the sight of them, her eyes filling with tears. She takes them in for a moment, letting the changes sink in.

Allison is still the most beautiful woman Vanya’s ever seen, even with a welt striping across her cheek, even with her braids having fallen loose from her bun, two long, strangely purple serpents dangling halfway down her back.

And Five is Five, lean and tall and sharp and... _different_ somehow in a way she can't quite put a finger on.

Allison had taken her tactical belt off to wrap around the neck of one of the men who’d attacked them, and now that the threat’s been neutralized, she’s slinging it back over her wide hips, glancing over her shoulder at the crumpled heap suspiciously.

Vanya stares at the scattering of bodies, twisted in all the wrong ways, leaking blood from their shattered eardrums. A soft, nervous little noise escapes from her throat.

 _Oh,_ Allison remembers. _She’s new to all of this._

“Hey,” Allison says. The smooth tone of her voice rolls down the hallway towards her, and Vanya is so elated that she doesn’t even flinch. 

“Your scar,” Vanya murmurs, staring at the smooth column of Allison’s neck.

Allison smiles wryly at her. “Well, if you like, we can put it back.”

Vanya pales, and Allison winces. “I’m just saying,” she backpedals, “I lived and I got it all back. Eventually.”

“So you…” Vanya hadn’t gotten the chance to ask her in 1955; everything had happened so quickly, and it had simply slipped her mind. And, she’d been a little afraid to do so, some small part of her fearful that if she were to ask, to reopen that wound, so to speak, that she might be left behind. Now, she wants to say it, but she finds she’s too choked to finish the sentence aloud, so she can only do so in her mind: _Forgive me._

Allison, who can tell exactly what she’d intended to ask, simply nods.

Vanya sighs, smiling warmly in a way that Allison’s simply never seen before, and then her eyes fall on Five. 

She blinks. 

“Hi,” she whispers.

“Hi,” he replies, staring at her in an open, vulnerable way that makes Alison feel the need to turn away, like she’s imposing on something incredibly private. 

Vanya moves swiftly, fueled by an exhilaration that runs far deeper than simple happiness, throwing her arms around him. He lets her, carefully bringing his arms up around her, and sighing, allowing himself to melt into her embrace. 

“You found us,” he says, swelling with pride.

“I did,” she replies, the shape of a smile curling into his neck. 

She’s the first one to pull back, peering at his face, at the way she has to crane her neck up to look at him, and she frowns.

“You’re... older?” Vanya remarks. She glances over at Allison, as if looking for confirmation that she isn’t just seeing things.

“Yeah,” he grumbles, keenly aware of the _aching_ of his body, of the angry red creases in his skin around his joints, the ones he’d glimpsed back at the mansion while he’d been changing. Of the ones below the skin, where his muscles feel stretched-out and tender. “I seem to be skipping through puberty.”

“Time travel?”

“Time travel.”

Vanya frowns. “Are we going to be doing any more of that?”

It’s clear in the tone of her voice that she wants to do anything but. And, well, Five gets it. They hadn’t exactly had a fun time in the sixties, or the fifties. They’d done so much, and they’re all still reeling, but that petulant part of Five, the flighty part that wants to take off and prove himself, wants to argue with her. To say, _no, I can do it, just let me show you. Let me make just one more jump, and another after that, and another after that. Let me make the timeline perfect, let me save the world, let me come back in a body that isn’t wrong for… for everything._

He doesn’t voice it, letting the words die inside of him; He’d let that voice guide him a long time ago, and it’d set so much of this mess in motion. And he’d done it all because he simply couldn’t be patient. 

He’ll do it now, he decides; the simple fact is that she’s waited for him long enough, and now it’s his turn to return the favor. He still has some growing up to do, and this time, he thinks he’ll let it happen at its own pace.

“No,” he says quietly, tucking his chin over her right shoulder. “I think we’re done with that.”

Then, he draws back, frowning; right, she’s deaf in this ear. A pang of guilt hits him hard in the gut; he’s practically cut off a limb, in hurting her like this, in severing her from so much of her power, and--

She’s smiling at him.

He frowns.

“It’s back,” Vanya says. “My hearing’s back. This body, it…” She frowns, searching for the word. Failing to find it, she brings her hand up to touch at her forearm, running the edge of her thumb along it in thought.

“That’s good, isn’t it?” Allison says, but Vanya shakes her head slightly.

“I don’t know,” she admits, taking a step towards her sister. “This body just… it doesn’t totally feel like it’s mine. Does that make sense?”

“Definitely.”

Allison shudders, reminded of those phantom pains of new wounds that should be here, but simply aren’t. She can feel the scald of boiling hot coffee splashing her crotch, or the burn of a tender wound in her throat, or the tender ache of a bruise in her side, only to remember that this body hadn’t learned any of those pains, and is merely being haunted by them.

She shakes her head quickly, as if doing so will shake away the eeriness of it, reaching out to gently squeeze Vanya under her arm. Vanya leans into her, wrapping an arm around her back to squeeze back. She smells like sweat and leather and nail lacquer and hair oil, and Vanya smiles into her shoulder.

“Are you all that’s here?” Vanya asks.

“No,” replies Five. “Everyone came. We’re here for you.”

Vanya rubs at her eyes, quickly, her heart so warm and bright that it might burst out of her chest, and for the first time she really sees that they’re wearing a version of that old mission uniform she hasn’t truly seen in twelve years. The Umbrella Academy had suited up for a mission, complete for the first time since they were all thirteen, and they had done it for her.

She looks around, as if Ben and Diego and Klaus and Luther are going to pop out of one of the rooms. “Well, where’s everyone else, then?”

“We don’t know,” replies Allison, detaching from her sister, reaching down to rub at her sore knees, which she suspects have been blackened with bruises given how much time she’d spent on them burrowing around. “We got separated.” 

“Are they alright?” Vanya frets. Her mind can't help but flash through the worst, grisliest ways that Five and Allison could have separated from their brothers.

“They will be, once we find them,” Five replies. “Now come on, let’s get them and get the hell out of here.”

He loops his thumbs through his utility belt and extends an arm down the hall. Allison follows his lead, picking carefully over the bodies, and Vanya joins them a moment later, still a little starstruck, but not the least bit afraid; she isn’t alone anymore, and therefore, for a single golden moment, she’s invincible.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Never gonna be satisfied with wide swaths of this chapter. No idea why it gave me such trouble. But hey, she's done!


	4. all your true hate

Vanya hears it first: the creak of a door opening into the stairwell, far below them. By the time the sound echoes up the funnel of the stairwell, she’s already wrapped her hands around Five and Allison’s forearms, dragging them back into the landing.

“What is it?” asks Five.

Then, the heavy, plodding steps of something absolutely enormous treading up the steps, a rumbling of a deep, gravelly voice, murmuring something unintelligible.

Allison breaks away, stepping to the edge of the banister, and leaning over to take a look. There are wisps of curly hair at the edge of her vision, flickering like purple flame, and she sweeps it away, to peer down into the dizzying spiral. Down, down, down, she sees it, the way a diver might stare into the blue beneath them and glimpse a flash of a strange fin: The flicker of an enormous greenish arm, thick dull claws, a smear of white hair, a single luminous eye.

She jerks back.

“Can we take them?” asks Five.

“Nope,” she says succinctly, and, noting the way her face has paled, Five and Vanya each individually decide that they will trust her judgment. 

So, the three dip quickly through the door leading to the sixth floor, and try the door of the room closest to the stairs, which, thankfully, is open.

The room’s in a similar state of disrepair as the rest; the walls are immaculate, and the windows are perfectly uncracked, but the furniture looks as though it’d endured a shipwreck. Vanya picks up her feet carefully, to avoid digging splinters into them, and wobbles unsteadily on her toes as she crosses the room to the far corner, where an enormous wooden bed has been turned on its side, as what she’s assuming is a sort of barricade. 

There’s no one behind it, and she sighs in relief, pressing her back to the wall. She sinks down, drawing her knees up to her chest, and burying her face in her arms as she practices breathing.

Five and Allison settle into place, each opposite her, each reaching for particularly large splinters of wood with which to use as admittedly mediocre weapons.

They all stare warily at the door, and Vanya fights off the cloud of fatigue settling thickly over her thoughts, to focus on the lumbering footsteps getting closer, closer, closer…

And then, passing away, as if it were a storm that had suddenly chosen to change course.

Vanya sighs in relief, and nods.

Five relaxes. 

“We’re good?” Allison asks.

“Yes,” Vanya replies, taking the ends of her sleeves and pulling them over her hands. 

None of them are in a particularly urgent hurry to leave. Allison draws herself up to her feet, pussyfoots over the mess of tripping hazards, and moves to the window, drawing the fine blue curtain back to take a look at the dark sky outside.

For the life of her, she can’t tell how long they’ve been here. Has it been only a few hours, or have days slipped by them sneakily? All the halls look the same, so it’s difficult to discern exactly how long she and Five had wandered them.

“It’s too quiet,” Five mutters, shuffling up from his place leaning against the bedframe to kick at a chunk of what had once been a lamp’s neck.

“It’ll drive us crazy,” replies Allison. 

“Yeah?” Vanya says, “Try watching T.V.” 

“...What’s on T.V.?”

“Good question,” Vanya grumbles.

Five’s shouldered up beside Allison, to take his own turn at staring at the inkspill-dark sky, and he frowns.

Out on the scarred gray plain of the desert, there’s a man. 

“Who the hell is _that?”_

“Who is who?” asks Vanya.

“There’s a man out there, in the desert.”

“Oh,” Vanya says drowsily, slouching against the wall. “That’s the Scientific Man, I think. I heard some people talking about him a while ago.”

 _“Who?”_ Five glances to Allison, who shrugs. 

“Doesn’t ring a bell,” she replies. “You suppose he’s a villain of ours who the other Academy defeated? One we would’ve fought if we hadn’t all broken up?”

“I guess,” Five mutters. _Who_ he is doesn’t matter half as much as _what_ he is, and _what_ he is, is a fellow prisoner of Hotel Oblivion who’d found a way outside. Which means that somewhere, there’s a door leading out. 

Five voices his hunch, and Allison nods encouragingly. “That’s good,” she says. “We just need to find where he got out.” 

“Great,” he replies. 

The joy of reunion has worn off, and the ever-present silence of the hotel grips each of them down to their bones. The three of them fall into a state of vigilant listening, as a flurry of footsteps pounds above them, and an argument breaks out somewhere below. 

And as they listen, Vanya thinks.

There’s something that had occurred to her, plucking at the back of her mind, when she’d first laid eyes on her family, but she’d forgotten it so quickly. Now, with nothing to distract her, it comes rising back to the front of her mind. 

“You came here for me,” Vanya says, her voice soft and airy, the way it gets when she’s trying to talk around something she considers serious, but too delicate to approach head-on. “All of you did.”

“Yes,” Five replies, resting his weight on his forearms, peering over the ruined bed.

“So…” Vanya shakes her head, as if she’s trying to dissuade herself from speaking to them. “I was the only one of us to be locked up here, wasn’t I?”

Five and Allison exchange a quick, tense glance, which tells Vanya she is correct.

She wrings her hands, drawing her shoulder up to draw a stray, scraggly strand of short hair behind her ear. “What was it for?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Five replies bluntly. 

“Yes it does,” Vanya protests, tightening her arms around her knees.

“No,” Five insists, “It doesn’t.”

Vanya glares at him. 

“Tell me,” she snarls, her eyes flashing warningly. “I have to know.”

Five’s brow knits. But he relents: “You tried to cause the apocalypse.”

“Again,” replies Allison, who realizes just after the word left her mouth that it had not exactly been helpful. “But it didn’t work. We stopped you. Or, our other selves did.”

Vanya takes the news the way she might take a bullet to the chest, with a full-body twitch, and a flare of numbness that spreads like a cancer through her entire body. Her eyes are burning, and a noise creaks out of her throat, something half between a sob and a laugh.

She rolls back her sleeve, staring at the old, faded tattoo. She’s so _stupid._ What else could it have been? 

And in realizing it, Vanya feels a sharp spear of despair pierce her right in the heart. _Is this it,_ she thinks. _Is this all I’m capable of?_

The fearful, violent, brutal power living within her does not terrify her anymore, but she is still woefully aware of its might, and of how little control she has of it. 

_I’m too much_ , she worries. _I’m too much, I’m too powerful, and I’m always going to explode and kill everyone and ruin everything, it’s all I’m good for. And if it’s all I’m good for, then..._

“Do you… Do you think that maybe I…” She swallows. “Do you think I need to stay here?”

“What?” Five breathes.

“You _can’t_ want that,” insists Allison.

“I don’t,” Vanya says. “I really don’t, but if I’m too dangerous, if this is all I can do, then do you think that maybe--”

“Who the hell cares why you’re here?” Five snaps, “The point is that you never should’ve been.”

“But the rest of these people should?”

“That’s not the same.”

“It is, though, isn’t it? They’re monsters too, right?”

“It doesn’t matter at all,” Allison protests, a touch of gentleness to her voice, “If they are, or if they aren’t. _You_ say who you are. Nobody else gets a word about it.” 

“Vanya,” says Five, moving carefully around the bedframe, to sit in front of her. “You’re not a monster.”

“I know,” she says, unconvincingly. “I _know_ but… but does it really _matter?_ If I can do something that terrible, if I’ll do it no matter what? I mean… can you imagine it? Killing _all_ those people?”

“You didn’t, in this world. We stopped you.”

“Yes, but I did in _ours._ And it doesn’t matter if ours isn’t here anymore, because I still did it. I still _remember_ doing it.”

“You didn’t enjoy it,” Five says.

“It doesn’t matter, Five, I told you that it wouldn’t have mattered. I wouldn’t have _cared_ at all if I’d done it. I just… I _slipped_ and… and I _killed_ everyone.”

Five swallows thickly, staring at the ragged edge of Vanya’s white shirt. Guilt tastes terrible, like blood in your mouth, and he’s worried he’ll start choking on it.

“Alright,” he says, leaning in. His words are trembling, are so afraid of leaving him, of dredging up the worst of his memories, but he has to. He can and he will, so he does: “Let me tell you about the worst thing I’ve ever done.”

Allison goes rigid.

“I was working for the Commission, and I got this assignment,” Five continues. “London, the nineties. It always struck me as strange, because I’d never gotten one after ‘88 before; the Commission does that, you know, they make sure you can’t take any missions after your birthday, and you can probably guess why.”

“So you can’t change anything?”

“Very good,” Five replies, “So I was tasked with killing this couple, and I can’t recall their names, but I was to _terminate with extreme prejudice.”_

“And you…”

“I did as I was told,” Five says, “I went to their home, and I tied them up, and I let them lay on the ground for an hour as I went around destroying the place. Then, I blew them to pieces with a machine gun. Their kid was under the bed the whole time, watching me, and I could see her crying the whole time I was there. And she was still crying when I left.”

 _“Jesus,”_ Allison hisses, mostly under her breath.

“But you had to. You were just…”

 _Following orders_ is a little cliche to say, so she stops herself, ashamed that she can’t think of any other word for it. 

“It doesn’t matter,” Five replies.

He’d loved killing the Board. He’d loved incinerating the Handler. But they were people who had harmed him, who had harmed him so deeply that he’ll spend the rest of his life with the scars they’d inflicted on him. This pair had done nothing to him at all, and he’d still killed them with the same vicious prejudice, as if they'd done all the harm in the world.

Five grimaces. “You wouldn’t know this, Vanya, being that you haven’t had to fight as we have, but there’s this… this strange sort of madness that hits you, in the middle of all that violence. Your blood’s up, and your heart’s racing, and your mind’s on fire and you just… you start to _like_ it. You get _high_ on it. So after a minute, it doesn’t matter if you were doing it in self-defense, or if someone told you to do it. Because you did it, and you liked it, and you’ll do it again.” 

Vanya lifts her head from her arms, and looks at him.

“If you want to call yourself a monster,” he continues, “That’s fine by me. I’m one too, and so is Allison, and so are Luther and Klaus and Ben and Diego. All of us are. So let me tell you, from one monster to another, that you do not deserve to be here.”

He searches Vanya’s face for some tiny giveaway in the twitch of her eyebrows, or the way her lip curls, some tiny movement that betrays disgust or fear or condescension, some indication that a door in her is slamming shut and closing herself from him forever.

Instead, she unwraps her arms from around her legs and leans forward, reaching around his shoulders to hold him close. She reaches a pale hand out, searchingly, and finds the leathery fabric of Allison’s uniform, tugging her in, and even in the preternatural chill of Hotel Oblivion, the three of them find a little bit of warmth.

"Alright," Vanya says, breaking away and climbing to her feet. "Let's go."

* * *

The hall Ben and Klaus have emerged into is dark and chilly as a morgue, but in the room at the far end of it, there’s a line of dull, pulsing red light flickering weakly, like a fire that’s about to sputter out. 

Clearly, that’s where Terminal is.

And, unfortunately, that’s where they’re headed, because that’s where Vanya’s violin is.

Ben has insisted upon returning for it, and so here they are, treading down the hall with their hearts skipping nervously in their respective ribcages. Neither Ben nor Klaus has ever been particularly adept at the mission thing; both had always preferred to hang back in the corner whenever their siblings would throw themselves into the line of fire, and while Ben was capable of being persuaded into participation, Klaus would simply make himself conveniently scarce when the going got tough.

That’s not an option now; it’s just the two of them, and the violin case they need to retrieve, and the enormous cosmic furnace standing between them. 

So, Ben grimly zips down the front of his jumpsuit, cursing under his breath about why Dad had never bothered to leave a separate zipper for his stomach alone, so he won’t have to look absolutely ridiculous when he lets the horror loose. 

But, well, if this field trip to Hell has taught them anything, it’s that their father didn’t much care about practicality. After all, who in his right mind would lump each and every one of his greatest foes in a room together, lock the door, throw out the key, and simply leave them to it.

 _Honestly,_ Ben thinks. _It’s a miracle there hasn’t been some sort of breakout already._ He knows with absolute certainty that there being one is not a matter of _if,_ but _when._

And if they don’t have that violin when they find Vanya, Ben is quite frankly sure that the embarrassment will make him wish he were corporeal again. Especially given that Klaus is prone to sputtering out secrets at inopportune times, and therefore the simple fact that he is aware that Ben had brought Vanya’s violin-- and had lost it to one of their most notorious villains-- is enough to cause a scene. 

And given everything, given what he’s seen Vanya do only a few weeks ago, he’s very, very certain that he doesn’t want to cause a scene in which Vanya plays the role of an angry god. Ben’s had his body for maybe less than a day, he’s eaten twice, thrown up one and a half times, used the bathroom thrice, and he hasn’t even slept yet. 

_Not that I’ll be able to after we leave this place,_ he thinks grimly, staring at an ominously rust-colored stain that had spilled out from beneath a door they pass.

Point is, he doesn’t really want to get smited by her.

And beyond that, it’s the principle of the thing: He wants Vanya to have her violin, because Luther had said it was her lightning rod. And if they’re to break out of this place, he’d feel a lot better about their odds if Vanya were firing on all cylinders, and firing _precisely._

They don’t really have a plan beyond Show Up And See What Happens, but that’s been their plan for most of their lives, so at least it’s familiar enough. Worst to worst, they’ll fight, and Ben might be twelve years out of practice, and Klaus might be gaunt and worn by addiction, but they’re both Hargreeves kids, so they know the principle of how to throw a punch or break an arm better than most of the people who are locked up here. 

When Klaus turns the knob of the door, Ben becomes suddenly so acutely aware of the way his lungs are kneading air quickly in and out, in and out, in and out. 

Oh yeah, the old pre-mission jitters. He never did love those. He’s real lucky that he’d left the contents of his stomach behind him, or he’d probably need to fertilize that potted plant in the corner.

The door opens, Klaus clutching the knob carefully, to make sure the creak is as minimal as possible, and, to the Hotel’s credit, it glides open soundlessly. Someone’d been up here, oiling the hinges.

Red light pours into the hallway, and with it flows a wave of sickly heat, the kind that makes his uniform cling stickily to his skin. 

_We are climbing into an oven,_ he thinks, smiling dumbly at the thought; he is climbing into an oven, heated by one of the worst villains their family has ever fought, and he’s so happy to be alive, to walk and feel his footfalls make an impact on the ground, to feel the sweat slicking up the inside of his suit and his heart thrumming nervously in his chest. He is doing something incredibly stupid, but he is _doing_ it, and he _can_ do it, because he is _alive_ to do it.

So, Ben leads the way across the threshold. 

And they find Dr. Terminal alone. 

There’s no one in this room he’s taken up in, no one but him. 

_He’s sleeping,_ Ben realizes, as he notes the slow rise-and-fall of his bulbous chest, and the way his milky eyes have rolled back in his head. 

And there, on the opposite side of the room, only a few dozen feet away, is the violin case, on a side table stacked high with odds and ends. Their utility belts hang from the back of a chair nearby, but Ben doesn’t bother reaching for those; there are far too many things that might bump together and produce noise, and it’s the last thing they need.

He takes one step. Then another. And another.

As Ben creeps across the room, Klaus stares at old Terminal and wonders about what could have caused a man to spend his days floating like a hellish blimp through the city, sucking up good, innocent giraffes and slightly less innocent streets. 

Then he remembers what he’d realized a few hours ago, a dangerously useful factoid that had simply seeped through the creases in his brain and been lost to the noise of being kidnapped, and of a different drama of a deeply personal nature. 

And he gets it: The old doctor is dying, a fading old star ready to collapse in on itself.

 _My hunger is never-ending,_ the doctor would say, over and over, enough to be immortalized in the little action figures Dad had licensed of him say it in a little speaker that would play when you jabbed your little child-finger into his black hole belly.

But it seems like it’s going to end real soon.

 _Terminal, huh,_ he thinks, reconsidering the name, and what it must surely mean, for him to have chosen it. He respects a good double-meaning. Klaus wonders what sort of illness must have prompted him to build this big old suit, if perhaps he thought that by consuming enough matter, he might generate enough energy to fight whatever it was that was ailing him. Or, if whatever body he’d had been in so poor shape that he’d seen not shame in carving a big hole in the center of it and rigging it with an artificial black hole…

He gets it, he supposes. Death is a terrifying thing to people who aren’t so intimately familiar with it as he is. 

The hard plastic case is pressed into his hands by Ben, and he grips the handle nervously, for fear that it’ll somehow slip through his sweaty fingers and clatter onto the floor.

They turn back, and start towards the door, a little surprised that it was this easy to get to him; the old doctor’s followers must be somewhere else, perhaps sleeping, or hunting, or packed into the bathroom for a long, pleasant shower after a bloodbath.

Ben stops, once they’re directly in front of the doctor.

He stares at the glowing red sun at the heart of Terminal’s abdomen, and he reaches for the seam in his uniform. 

Klaus looks at him, noting the painfully familiar shade of purple Ben’s face has turned to, and the strange, liquid bulging in his abdomen, like his guts had up and decided they’d rather not live under his skin, actually, and would quite like to squeeze out and go crawling across the floor.

Which, he supposes, is probably how the monsters work. Ben has never liked to talk about them much, not even to Klaus, so he doesn’t exactly know for certain. 

He pictures it, in his head: a burst of bright, ruddy tentacles bursting out of his brother’s gut, lashing towards Dr. Terminal… and being drawn, taut as a rubber band, into that suction of vortex, being wrenched tighter, tighter, tighter, until they’re rooted out--

Klaus brings a hand up to Ben’s shoulder, and when their eyes meet, he mouths, _don’t._

It would be easy, so _easy,_ to kill him.

But what would be the _point_ in that?

Avenging Tippy, of course, is on his mind, but, as Klaus knows far too well, giraffes do not have the capacity to manifest ghosts, so he’s long gone in the savannah in the sky, and likely does not care at all about how he’d gotten there. 

And then there’s the tactical argument: Dr. Terminal will escape, will break out and uproot the city and kill dozens or hundreds or even thousands in his quest to satiate that never-ending hunger.

Before coming here, Klaus would have agreed with Ben. He’d have nodded, and said, _yes, he is simply too dangerous a monster to be allowed to live._

But looking at him now, listening to the nails-on-a-chalkboard creaking of his lungs working to keep him breathing as he sleeps, Klaus doesn’t really see the point; _broken as you are,_ he thinks, _how can you hurt me?_

 _Well,_ says the shitty little voice in the back of his head that tends to land him in a lot of bad places, but is right just often enough to warrant entertaining, _judging by the ominously conspicuous absence of the skin, muscle and sinew of the skeleton lying in the corner, like that._

He ignores it. It’s the principle of the thing that counts more than the functionality; they are in a new world, and they don’t have to make the choices they’ve made before, and this one he’s making now may be misguided, but then again, most of his tend to be misguided, so perhaps he’s had it in him to do this for a very long time.

The point is, they’re here to try again, so he’s going to try again.

“Let’s go,” Klaus whispers.

“What? But--”

“We’re fine. Let’s _go.”_  
He takes Ben by the forearm, and tugs him out of the room. Through it all, their old adversary hasn’t stirred. He won’t even know they were here, until he sees the vacant spot on his table where the violin had once been.

 _Fine by me,_ Klaus thinks, as they book it down one hall, then another, up one flight of stairs, then down another, and dive into a family suite. 

They’re stopping, mostly, because though their bodies seem to be far more in shape than they remember them, their consciousnesses are decidedly not familiar with the experience of sprinting for your life and not feeling your heart ready to explode in your chest, or your side about to burst. 

They’re stopping, because they need a place to hide while they pant like a pair of panicked dogs, until they settle down enough to get ready to move again. Also, Vanya’s case is heavy, and Klaus groans in relief when he sets it on the floor. 

“We lived,” Ben says.

“Yeah. I guess we did,” Klaus grins, as he rubs feeling back into his shoulder. “So far, at least.”

Ben stares at the case. “And we did it.”

“Sure did--”

Klaus never gets to finish his sentence. Ben has his hands in his collar, is tugging him forward. He slots his mouth over Klaus’s, and gives him the sloppiest kiss he’s ever had.

He’s laughing when Ben pulls away, staring at him warily.

“I forgot,” Klaus says, “You’ve never done this before, have you?”

He hasn’t, judging by the way his ears turn pink. 

“I’m sorry,” Ben begins, his face quickly going blank. “I… uh.”

 _It was the adrenaline,_ he wants to say. _My blood's running, and I'm not used to it, and I just lost control for a second, and that's all it was..._

“Here,” Klaus says, glancing at the door for a moment. “We’ve got time, right?” 

"Yeah? I guess?”

“Do it again.”

* * *

Luther watches Diego toss a knife up into the air, and make it turn a bright, sharp circle around his wrist, moving so quickly that the blade slashes an arc of blue-white in the air it passes through. _How ironic,_ he thinks, _that it took a completely different perspective on his power for Diego to find a new facet of it._

When Diego had stared down at his hands in the pool, realizing exactly what he’d done with them, Luther had figured it out too, and had burst out laughing. It hadn’t sounded mean, but the way a person would laugh when they realized something that should’ve been obvious all along, and so Diego had joined him.

In an odd way, it makes a lot of sense to the both of them; if Diego can manipulate the projectile of an object moving away from him, why not an object moving _towards_ him as well?

It makes sense, that Lila would discover this part of his power before him; Luther supposes that it’d come natural to her, a former Commission agent and consummate liar, and a woman with the power to reach out, pluck his own out of him and turn it against him, to deflect and redirect. Of course she’d discovered it so quickly.

And it makes sense that Diego wouldn’t know after all this time; Diego’s always been one of the one-track mind, always been so set on a single goal, and Dad had encouraged this. He’d had specific visions of what he’d wanted each of his children to be, and once he’d determined the mold, he had been reluctant to carve away from it. Diego had trained extensively, perhaps even more than the rest of them, given the size of the chip on his shoulder, but he had only ever trained to be one thing.

Luther does not begrudge him this; of all people, knows a thing or two about being so set in your ways that you’re blind to far more than you ought to be.

If anything, Diego begrudges himself. He thinks of how much time had been wasted, on chasing after Luther, on slashing at anything and everything with words and weapons, when he could’ve been doing so much _more._

He wants to. He wants to do more, to step through the door that’s swung open, to explore those parts of himself that he’d never bothered to know before.

But first, there’s something he has to do. Something he has to answer for.

He’d made a damn fool of himself, back in the sixties, and in doing so he’d brought Lila into their lives. And in some sense, he supposes, he might have some small fraction of the blame for what ripples of change had caused their current situation, wandering back through the ground halls of the Hotel. 

And beyond that: Something’s wrong with Luther.

Luther likes vanilla ice cream and getting A-pluses and reading about Saint Zero in the papers, and tinkering with model trains until they run the length of the tracks he sets up meticulously in his bedroom. He’s cool and collected and determined to focus everyone around a single plan, even if his plans tend to fall on the mediocre side.

Luther doesn’t bristle with rage like this. He’s trying to hide it, trying to stay cool and disaffected, but there’s a tension in the way he’s walking, a twist in his gnarled shoulders and a clench in his jaw that Diego recognizes from years of peering at himself in the mirror. He’s fit to burst with anger, and it’s not like him.

Diego, having spent years wandering down this path of listless, directionless wrath, knows where it leads. And, knowing this path, he feels an obligation to Luther, to look after him as he treads it. He can’t stop him, and he won’t be able to even if he tries, but maybe he can help him find a way back from it.

And to do that, he’s going to have to air some shit out. 

“Listen. All that shit back in Dallas--”

“Save it.”

“No, Luther. Seriously. I fucked up, alright?” 

“You were right. We never should have entertained talking to Dad.”

“But talking to him got us here.”

“Exactly. It got us _here.”_ Luther brandishes a broad arm towards the dingy greenish walls. 

“No,” Diego protests. “What I mean is, it got us _here,_ back in our time, back in 2019.” 

“And at what cost? We never left home in this world. We don’t have lives of our own, Allison doesn’t have…” Luther chokes. “She doesn’t have her _kid._ Claire isn’t _real_ anymore.”

Diego sags. He hadn’t even thought of it, to be honest, but now that Luther’s brought it up, he feels a cold, heavy weight settle in his chest. He’s never even met Claire, hadn’t even had time to consider if he had even _wanted_ to, and now she’s gone. And he quite literally cannot imagine what it feels like to be Allison right now.

“Luther, you can’t bla--”

Luther snatches him by the back of his uniform, tugging him sharply behind a couch.

There’s something shuffling at the edge of the hall, something _enormous_ and hunched over and _green,_ with bone-white tusks and matted ropes of pale hair drifting down past her waist. She looks like how one might picture the troll under one’s local bridge to look, if such creatures were, of course, real. She seems to be minding her own business, peering up and down the halls intensely, focused on finding something.

 _Us,_ thinks Diego. _She’s looking for us,_ and he readies his knife. 

Beyond them, the elevator _pings._

And out walks a man with thin, gray-pink lips and blue eyes as brittle as chunks of ice. His face has the deep callouses that the brothers know from experience are caused by nothing other than domino masks, and he’s wearing a cape that he’s drawn up and bundled around his middle. It’s so bedraggled and dirty that Luther has no idea what color it had originally been, but the color of it doesn’t matter; he recognizes the shape of the costume.

“The Murder Magician,” he says under his breath, and Diego double takes. 

_“That_ guy?” He points his knife at the Magician, who stands halfway between them and the troll-like creature.

“Yeah.”

“Well, what’s he--”

A high, plaintive wail bellows out from the man’s chest, from where his cape’s bundled thickest, and they both know instantly what the cause of it is.

The troll-like creature swings her head around, hair lashing.

The Murder Magician twists his graying brow, and reaches down into his makeshift sling, to bounce a small, dirty baby. 

_“What?”_ Diego mutters, and Luther snatches his wrist, dragging it down.

 _“Leave it,”_ Luther hisses, and Diego obeys.

 _Yes,_ he thinks. _That is a baby. That is a real, live, flesh-and-blood baby, and it was most certainly born here._

The troll-like creature shuffling down the hall isn’t stopping, isn’t turning around, isn’t turning a corner. In a moment, she and the Murder Magician will run into each other, and is he really about to throw himself in front of the man who’d nearly killed Allison when they were teenagers?

Yes. Judging by the way Luther’s legs are coiling up, preparing to leap over the back of the couch and sprint, he most definitely is.

But then, the Magician turns to the troll, not a hint of fear in his body language.

“Hey Clarissa,” he says tiredly. “It’s your turn with Oscar, right?”

“Yeah,” she replies, in a voice as rough around the edges as a shattered bone. She reaches out with overly-long, bony arms, taking the unusually small child into them, and steps into the elevator, which he holds for her. “It’s Monday right?”

“Who the fuck knows. I guess.” he says, climbing in beside her, as the doors close, “Listen, me and Obscura and some of the other guys are thinking about making another break for it, and I get that you and I aren’t exactly _together_ anymore, but I’m thinking we could use--”

The elevator ascends, taking with it the muffled conversation.

And Luther and Diego are alone again, absorbing what they’ve just seen.

Luther looks around him with new eyes, eyes that evaluate Hotel Oblivion a little differently. This is a prison, yes, full of prisoners, but it’s a home too. A terrible home, but a home nonetheless, full of terrible people, who are people nonetheless. It’s a place where someone could fall in and out of love and have a baby and keep it alive and love it.

 _This is a mistake,_ he thinks. _This place never should’ve been built._

“Let’s go,” he says. “Let’s just go.”

* * *

In lieu of simply wandering aimlessly for hours, and opening themselves up to potential harm, Vanya and her party have opted to stay where they are, to remain in the destroyed room they’d sheltered in, and to try a different method of locating their family.

Vanya’s been sitting in the center of her sonic net, for a while now, long enough to begin nodding off, as the humdrum nature of picking through strange hisses, snarls, bangs and whimpers takes its toll on her. 

She finds nothing at all, until she looks back at a space she’d skipped over before, a floor below them, where two men she’d decided to pointedly ignore out of respect for what they were clearly doing at the time, have ceased that very activity.

In lieu of pillow talk, they are bickering, and as they do, Vanya realizes that the pitch and tone of one voice is _familiar_ to her, the other… _isn’t,_ not at all.

“... really is just the _dumbest_ thing…”

“Hey, I’m trying, but--”

“...why he didn’t just put another zipper here for the monsters I will never understand…”

“I think calling it a monster is a little _generous,_ huh?”

“That’s not what I meant. At all.”

“Oh I know. I was making a joke, am I not allowed to make jokes?”

“That was honestly the cheesiest thing I’ve ever heard you say.”

“Sorry.”

“No, it was hilarious. But if you ever call it that again, as a joke or otherwise, we are _never_ doing this again...”

Yep. Vanya knows _exactly_ who she’s listening to.

“Guys,” she says, and watches her companions turn to peer back at her. “I found them. I found Ben and Klaus.”

“Great!” Allison says, springing to her feet. “Lead on.”

She does.

They leave the room behind, stepping out again into hostile territory, with Vanya screwing her face up in concentration, guiding them in an especially strange game of hot-and-cold, retracing the sound down the hall, down a flight of stairs, down another hall, and around a corner, _God,_ she hates the layout of this fucking hotel.

But they find them. 

Behind one perfectly nondescript door in a hall of perfectly nondescript doors, there’s the rubbery squeak of what Allison and Vanya recognize from years of hurriedly preparing for missions and years of watching siblings hurriedly prepared for missions, respectively, to be a person, balancing on leg as he bounces into the pants of his too-snug suit. 

Five, who had left long before the awful black uniforms had come to be, is totally unfamiliar with that sound, and does not share his sisters’ trepidations about reaching up and rapping sharply on the door.

Silence on the other end.

Then, the rubbery squeak intensifies. 

The tiny pinprick of light from the peephole vanishes, and Five waves at whoever is watching them, a tense, impatient smile drawn tightly across his too-wide mouth.

The door unlocks, and Klaus has hardly opened it a crack before Allison shoulders her way in imperiously, with each of her siblings in step behind her.

“Oh,” Klaus says. “Okay, well. Sure, fine, invite yourselves right in. We're entertaining.”

But he shakes it off quickly, becoming strongly invested in the prospect of hugging Allison, who is eager to reciprocate, and Five, who squirms like that angry alley cat Klaus had tried to take home once. He doesn't claw like the cat did, but he hisses like him. 

Vanya’s preoccupied with Ben; she’s staring at him, and her fading memories of his face struggle to accept the shape of his older one, the one he would have had if he hadn’t died. She notes the lack of baby fat, the warm, dark eyes, the strange sweep of hair falling in a pattern she’d never imagine Ben keeping it in; it looks as though he’s trying very hard to keep a swoop of very long bangs from getting in his face, but in the process of doing so, he has only drawn more attention to them.

And the scar. It’s healed over completely, and is clearly quite old, but it’s so large, that she’s sure it must’ve been a horrifying injury once.

“Gee, thanks,” Ben says, picking up on where she’s looking. 

“Sorry.” Vanya turns pink.

“It’s fine,” he says, opening his arms to her.

She goes to him immediately, nestling her face in against his shoulder, immediately hit with the uncomfortably intense stench of sweat that had gone to rot inside of ambiguously leathery material. But she can hear his heart beating in her ear, and he’s alive, and he’s _here,_ and she’s going to cry if she keeps holding onto him. 

So Vanya pulls away, smiling warmly, and lets Allison and Five descend upon him with demands of where they’ve been (kidnapped), what they’ve seen (weird shit), have they found Luther or Diego (no).

And she is left facing Klaus.

She looks at him, drawing her mouth in a tight, uncertain line, which he mirrors. The space between them seems much larger than it actually is. 

“We were never close,” Klaus says flippantly, to break the tension.

“And whose fault was that?”

Klaus feels that particular barb sting right between his ribs, and he decides he’s going to let it ache for a moment. He hadn’t been cruel to her, when they were children, at least not that often, not compared to a few of their other siblings. But he hadn’t been kind either, hadn’t even been hospitable. Just because he’d been a little shitheel out of cowardice, rather than meanness, doesn’t mean he hadn’t been a little shitheel.

“It’s not too late to start, is it?” he asks.

“No,” Vanya says, after a moment, “It’s not too late to start.”

He extends a gangly arm, and she allows him to fold it over her shoulders, and give her a squeeze. 

“Oh!” Klaus straightens, dropping his arm from around Vanya quickly. “Here!”

He hurries around the conspicuously unmade bed that Vanya is trying to avoid eye contact with, and reaches down behind it, producing... 

Her violin case.

Vanya’s eyes go wide, and she feels her heart throb in her throat.

Klaus tugs the latch open, flipping the lid up, and Vanya lays eyes on her beloved instrument for the first time in what feels like forever, but has only been a handful of very stressful weeks. 

The strings of her bow are mercifully still the bony off-white that they are meant to be. There are no rusty splatters of Allison’s blood to be seen, and Vanya is relieved that whatever had triggered the end, Allison seems to have been spared any of that pain.

But the bow and the violin are different. They’re the very same make and shape that she remembers, the very same objects, but they’re _white._

Vanya’s hands hover over the case, and she’s a hair’s width from tracing a fingertip along the curved edge of the body, but she stops. 

She thinks of what she had done with it, of all the lives that’d been lost because of her music. She thinks of the viscous pouring of blood from the front of Allison’s throat, of the sharp, living music that had poured from it that night the world ended, that must've done the very same thing here in this world, because of the color the wood's been turned to. 

She thinks of the day she’d picked it up, from the polished table where Dad had laid it out, just so she’d see it, just so she’d be tempted enough to ask about it. The violin had been meant to make her extraordinary, so she had believed, but it never did.

 _Well,_ Vanya thinks determinedly, _things are different now._ She may have used it in the hopes that she’d attain some sort of approval, but it had been _hers_ too. She’d loved music before she’d picked the instrument up, and maybe she’d chosen the violin because she wanted Dad to be proud of her, but somewhere along the way, she had made it her own.

 _Some things will stay,_ she decides. Vanya closes the case, flicks the latch closed, and takes it into her arms, smiling gratefully.

There’s a rumble of affectionate laughter around her, but it stops sharply and is left to decay in the air.

Just behind them, the phone is ringing.

* * *

Luther and Diego turn the corner of yet another identical-looking, dingy hallway, and come upon purple-gray walls and insect-husk chandeliers, and at once, they know where they are.

“Full circle,” mutters Diego, and Luther grumbles in agreement.

They’re back in the lobby.

Luther glances at the cavity in the wall where the televator ought to be. Still vacant.

No one’s here, again, and their footsteps echo threateningly against the rounded ceiling.

Luther stares down, into the marble floor, which has been polished again, at the ghostly shape of his reflection, looking back at him. He swallows quickly and tears his gaze away; a part of him worries, irrationally, that if he looks too long, he’ll realize that his reflection isn’t blinking in time with him.

The whole place is clean and immaculate. Apart from a small smear of red in the corner of a rug, no one could tell there’d been a riot here.

They approach the concierge desk, which is once again empty. Behind the desk is a door, one they’d neglected to notice once they’d first arrived.

Diego tries it, finding it stubbornly shut, and grumbles, reaching into his harness to find the most slender of his knives, to work at the lock. As he does, Luther shifts beside him, to watch his back.

“Hey,” Luther says, after a moment. He nudges his shoulder urgently. 

Diego glances up.

One of those strange inhuman bellhops is trudging down the hall, the one they’d sprinted down in a blind panic the last time they’d seen the rest of their siblings. Diego raises his knife in warning, but the creature doesn’t slow its passing, merely continuing along its course without so much as an acknowledgement, turning the corner and vanishing.

“Did it... not _see_ us?” Luther wonders.

“No, it saw us. It must have.” Diego frowns. “You know, I… I think they don’t _care_ that we’re here.”

“They care about the others. I saw one wrestling some guy with a bludgeon back when we first got here.”

“Well, _we’re_ not the others,” Diego points out, reaching down to return to his lockpicking. “None of us are guests. We’re the owner’s kids.”

Luther nods uneasily. It would explain why the two of them, and perhaps the others for all they know, were able to wander through the hotel without any interference, at least from the staff. 

“It’s not fair,” he says, mostly to himself. “None of it is.”

It’s not fair that they can go anywhere and the people here are being bolted into their rooms. It’s not fair that they’ve been fighting people who are so thin that their bones show through, whose clothes are hanging off of them in rags, who are waifish and wild. It’s not fair, that someone here has a baby, and that they weren’t allowed to come home to take care of it.

The door clicks open, and Diego puffs up, pleased with himself.

It leads to a long, narrow hallway, from which stem a set of dim offices that they suppose must belong to the staff, even if the place is totally empty. 

There’s a brass panel in the wall, and Luther flicks it open curiously, to find an ancient diagram that looks enough like the televator to warrant his conclusion that what he’s looking at must be some method of summoning or maintaining it. He runs a careful fingertip along the tangle of wires, and nods in certainty; _yes,_ this is it, this is their way out. 

“Hey.”

Luther turns.

Diego’s padding in from the end of the hall, a heavy, dusty binder in his hands. “Employee handbook,” he says with a grin. “Check this out: Hotel policy is that guests get three daily servings of-- oh, that’s _gross--_ A single cockroach.” Diego crinkles his nose in disgust.

And Luther’s gut clenches. He is reminded, vividly, of MREs too small to staunch the hollowness in his gut. 

He shoulders his way past Diego, into the far room, staring at a set of desks piled high with old documents, with promotional flyers and pamphlets. He sees a phone on one of the desks. It’s covered in a fuzzy film of dust, which Luther huffs off of it, and he picks it up.

There’s feedback in the receiver. It works. 

Luther settles into a spindly rolling chair, which creaks warningly under his weight, and he sighs, cracking his neck. He can’t think of anything else to do, but call each and every room listed in the musty directory he finds on the bookshelf nearby. 

So. He does.

Mostly, there’s nothing. But he keeps going, and as he does, Diego is content to let him. He still has his nose in the binder, flipping through and reading off passages that interest him.

“... Jazz Night is a monthly privilege for all outstanding guests, to be hosted in the Proserpine Ballroom… Guess it’s gonna be cancelled this month, huh?”

Nothing on the first floor. Just dead silence.

“... We here at the Hotel Oblivion have the right to search any room for any reason at any time… Oh, this was _definitely_ written by Dad...”

A tinny, metallic buzzing, like the drone of a mosquito.

“... All feminine hygiene products must be paid for at designated vending machines, no exceptions… Gross. I did not need to know about that.” 

A mouth, breathing wet and heavy into the receiver.

“... Klaus?”

More breathing. 

“Great. Thanks.”

He hangs up.

“... In the event of a total, irrevocable breach, the Scientific Man is present as a failsafe against all who escape the Hotel, and will act swiftly and without exception to obliterate all guests who violate Hotel protocol…”

A babble of noise so shrill and unintelligible, the best Luther can figure is that an army of cat-people are all yowling at once into the phone.

“... In order to maintain atmospheric integrity, all walls and doors self-repair as a result of extra-blah-blah-blah…”

On the fifth floor, Luther strikes gold.

“Hey, Doc, I thought you said we were clear--”

A sputtering of noise.

 _“Who the fuck is this?”_ snaps a reedy, perpetually-annoyed voice.

“Hey Five. Nice to hear your voice too.”

“Luther?” There’s rustling from the other line, the sound of many hands jostling for control of the phone. Luther waits until it settles down.

“Hello?”

“Hello,” says Five, still annoyed, “Yes, I’m listening. Where are you?”

“Ground floor. There’s an office, somewhere behind the front desk. Diego’s with me. Anyone with _you?_ That was Klaus, right?”

“Yes. I’m with him, and Allison and Ben. And we found Vanya. She’s a bit hungry, but she’s alive and with us.” 

“Oh, that’s great!” Luther leans away from the receiver. “Hey Diego, they found Vanya.”

“Good. Tell them to get the hell down here so we can leave.” 

“We’ll break a window,” Five decides. “Or I’ll just jump everyone outside--”

“--No,” Luther insists, lurching forward in the chair. “You can’t do that.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’re in space. The Hotel’s in space,” Luther explains, and hears a buzz of disbelief from the other end, as Five recounts what Luther’s told them. 

“No,” Klaus protests. “The Hotel’s on a lake, right? I mean, I haven’t _seen_ a lake from any of the windows, but it says so in the pamphlet. Apparently it’s a big one too, like, fifty kilometers wide. Hey, maybe we can get away in a _speedboat...”_

Luther’s eyes wander towards the end of the desk, staring at a crumpled pamphlet, one of the ones he recognizes from the lobby, the one Klaus is referencing. He reaches for it, whipping it up between his fingers to make sure he’s reading the words just right. 

_Lake of Forgetfulness,_ it says.

His blood chills.

“Diego.”

“What?”

“Translate this to Latin.”

“Why?”

“Just do it. Now.”

 _“Lacus Oblivionis,”_ he replies automatically. Then pauses, and looks at the spidery Hotel Oblivion logo emblazoned on the door. It was literally staring them in the face the entire time. “Oh.” 

“‘Oh’ _what?”_ asks Five irritably.

“Guys,” Luther says, “That’s not a lake, not a _literal_ one. That’s the name of a mare.”

"... A horse? Luther, we're not at a fucking racetrack."

"No, a sea. A sea of basalt. You know, the rock?"

“Oh,” says Klaus from somewhere in the background, applying his own somewhat-patchy memories of Dad-enforced Latin lessons to what Luther has just said. “How about that? We made it to the ocean after all.”

There’s a sputter of laughter, so strange yet familiar. _It’s Ben,_ Luther realizes. _Ben is laughing, and I haven’t heard him laugh in years._

“What?” buzzes the distant voice of Vanya.

“Sorry. Inside joke.”

“I’m sorry, what does that _mean?”_ demands Allison.

It means that Luther’s a damn _idiot._

It means that “Hotel Oblivon’s on the Moon.”

The words leave him in a pained exhale, as if he’d taken an invisible boot to the gut.

He can’t talk, after that. His jaw locks up and his chest is shaking with anger. The end of the table splinters in his grip.

His old station up on the Moon had been on the bright side, the one facing Earth. He’d been up there in the inky abyss of space for four years, diligently collecting samples and noting meteor showers and watching for threats, trying not to go mad from the loneliness, trying to make packets of soy paste and dried-out ice cream chips last for days until his next shipment would come in, trying to keep his tin can of a home from crunching up with him inside it.

And the entire time, he’d had no idea what was right under his nose. 

_Had I known…_

What _would_ he have done? If he’d known the Hotel were within a day’s drive from him? If he’d known all he’d ever have to do was pack a few MREs into his shuttle and drive out across the lunar desert to the dark side of the Moon and he’d find all the company he’d never had, all the space he’d been lacking, a way _home._

If he’d known, that this madness was what happened inside its walls. That people were starving for no reason, going mad and roving the halls in desperate packs, that _this_ was what happened to all of their old foes... 

_I don't know,_ he thinks. _I just don't know._

“Shit,” says Diego.

“Shit,” says Five.

“Shit,” says the chorus of miscellaneous siblings in that uncertain space just beyond him. 

Diego yanks the phone out of Luther’s hands. “Hey. Listen, get the hell down to the first floor. Take the stairs, or the elevator, or the laundry chute for all I care. Just do it. And when you do, get to the front desk. We found a way to get the televator back.”

He hands the phone back, and Luther accepts it numbly, listening to his family’s bickering fade. Perhaps they’ve gone into another room.

He wonders if he should hang up, but lingers for a moment. 

He is rewarded for his patience, when a hand plucks up the phone, and a warm, familiar voice 

“Hey,” says Allison. She sounds tired, down to her bones.

“Hey. You doing okay?”

“I’m fine. You?” 

The quiet between them is buzzing and uncertain. 

“Allison, I need you to know that I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

He draws in a long, heavy breath. “For Claire.”

“What about her?” He can hear a wobble in her voice.

“She’s gone,” he says, because he must say it, he _must_ get it out of him and into the open before it rots him away from the inside. “And I… _I_ did that. It’s my fault and you can hate me--”

 _“No.”_ she says firmly.

“But it _is,”_ he insists, “I took that from you. You know, you were going to _fix_ things with her? You were going to be a family again, and…” He buries his face in his hands. “And I _ruined_ it all. Because I was so _stupid,_ to think that we could still go to Dad--” 

“That’s _enough.”_

“I just… If you’re looking for someone to blame, it’s me. And it’s okay. I can carry that.”

Allison’s quiet for a while. She draws in a deep, wet, ragged breath.

“Let’s just get out of here,” she finally says. “Let’s get out of here, and we’ll see what happens from there.”

“Alright,” he agrees.

“Be safe. I’m coming. We all are.”

“You too.”

She hangs up, and he listens to the drone for a long while, as if the static hides some secret message that will tell him what to do.

It doesn't. 

* * *

Five arrives in a bright, blue-white solar flash, wiry and suspicious, with a smear of blood on cheek that seems to not be his own. He announces unceremoniously that the rest of the family will be along in a moment, having chosen to take the elevator, and he had decided to jump ahead, to ensure that it would be safe for their arrival.

Seeing that it is, he relaxes. Slightly. 

Luther splits off from them, to head off to the elevators to wait for the others.

Five and Diego watch him go, choosing to hover around the front desk, rifling through it for odds and ends they might find useful. 

There’s a little crystal dish of ancient-looking candies beside the guestbook, which is written in a strange script neither of them can decipher, that must be exclusive to the bellhops. Five is making swift work of devouring the candies, but pauses, after his fifth hard candy, and empties the dish onto the counter, counting the bright translucent wrapped-candies carefully, before pouring them into a little pocket on his utility belt.

“Saving for winter?” Diego snarks.

“Vanya hasn’t eaten in a while.”

“Oh.” Diego remembers the gaunt figures that he and Luther had come up against, or else hidden from. A chill rolls down his spine, as he recalls that Vanya had been here for months. “That’s uh… good.”

“So,” Five says, leaning against the counter, eyeing him for any potential weak spots that hadn’t been there when he’d last laid eyes on him. “How’ve you been?”

“Not great. You?”

“Not great.”

“Cool.”

“Yeah.”

Diego isn’t one for smalltalk, but he hates how quiet it is here so much, that even inane conversation is worth having. 

“So,” he tries, rather woodenly, “You’re not gonna believe it, but I found something out about my power.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. Hey, throw something at me.”

“What?”

“Throw something at me. I’m serious. I want to show you.”

“Well, if you insist.”

They are being listened to, it must be noted.

After Lila had pried herself off the pool wall, and had skidded in a panic through the men’s locker room in her quest to avoid becoming a hunk of Swiss cheese, she had doubled back, in search of her marks.

Using that extraordinary internal compass that binds her to those who are just like her, tugging her blood in their direction and keeping her wonderfully in tune with their feelings, she had opted to track the two Hargreeves she had located at a distance. As a pursuit predator might track their prey, she had chosen to keep a steady pace behind them, keeping them just at the edge of her senses, so they might be close enough to locate, but never too close to detect her.

Her patience has been rewarded handsomely, now that she feels that spark of a sudden, new presence rippling into her range of influence. She recognizes that sharp, electrical feeling and who it belongs to instantly, and she grins, a cat who’s certainly gained the cream.

He’s here. Number Five is here. He’s presented himself to her on a silver platter, and the knife that Diego had so generously provided her with is in her hand. She could throw it, she could send it whipping around the corner to cut his throat, but no, that wouldn’t work. That would be too quick, and he wouldn’t even know she’s here. And what’s the point of revenge, if your mark doesn’t look upon your face, doesn’t know exactly what you're here to do?

So Lila decides to make her entrance in spectacular fashion.

“You know,” she says, leaning around the corner, careful to slide her boots across the carpet in a way that communicates something casual, something _cool._ “I really do find it amazing, how _completely_ you’ve ruined my life.”

“Fuck!” Five barks, snatching the crystal dish and whipping it sloppily at Lila’s head.

She catches it in midair, and it comes flying right back at him, shattering on the wall just behind him into a hundred sharp shooting stars that roll right off his uniform.

“Oh yeah,” Diego says. _“She’s_ here.”

“Couldn’t have mentioned that?” Five snaps.

“It kinda slipped my mind, given everything.” 

Lila advances on them. “I mean, killing my mother? That’s _enough._ Destroying my job, really, that’s overkill. But _all_ of my parents?”

“All of them?” Five says blankly, blinking quickly as he tries to think of the many, many people he’s killed. 

“Don’t you _remember?”_ Lila scoffs in utter disbelief. Her voice is so bitter, she fears she’ll choke on it. “Their names were Ronnie and Anita, don’t you recall them? Did you ever bother to _learn_ them?”

“Five?” Diego asks. “What’s she talking about?”

Five keeps his tone even, watching the knife in Lila’s hands glint in the greenish light. He can see, even from here, exactly how this is going to go, and he’d like to mitigate the damage as well as he can. “Diego, go find Luther.”

“What?”

“I said, go find him. Right _now.”_

“No.”

Five sighs. “Fine.”

He jumps. 

And lands halfway down the hall. 

Lila stares at him, her face somewhere between hungry fascination and naked loathing.

But she takes the bait, taking off after him.

Lila knows better, than to jump long and far. Too risky, too liable to blow up in her face. 

But a few feet ahead? Oh, _that_ she can do.

So she takes off after him, sparking down the hall and landing right in front of him, drawing out her knife to slash--

\--Only to find that he’s already jumped ahead again, and she’s only slashing the electrical flash he’s left behind.

She pursues.

And he leads her on a flickering chase down the hall.

Five feels fairly confident, at first. He’s mastered his microjumps long ago, is far more adept at them than she is, and he can lead her on a merry chase as long as he needs to, luring her down a hall he knows already, to terrain familiar to him. 

But then, his powers sputter out, when he lands in the ballroom.

Five curses, feeling a sticky cloud of fatigue settle over his brain, then dives to the left, a moment before Lila flashes in after him, sliding directly under the arc of her blade as he scrambles under the skirt of a table, and out the other side.

 _Alright,_ he thinks. _Fine, teleporting’s out._

That’s fine. He’s adaptable. He snatches a butter knife off a nearby table, and holds it up in warning.

Lila’s backed away from him, is wiping a slick of sweat off her face, heaving. 

“Ordinarily,” Five says, “I’m in favor of revenge. But, seeing as you’ve attacked my family, I’m afraid that just won’t stand.” 

She stares at him.

“Kill Order 743.”

“What?”

“That was you. Those were my parents.” Lila watches him, watches the way he swallows, the way the blood drains from his face, and _knows_ in a strangely marrow-deep way she can’t quite put a finger on that he knows _exactly_ what she is talking about.

He does. 

“You’re right, alright?” he admits, “I killed them. But I killed a _lot_ of people over the years. It was just a job. It was never personal.”

Alright, well. He’d found a tiny spark of pleasure in it, but it hadn’t been because he was killing _them_ in particular. Very important distinction. 

“Oh, never personal, my ass. I’ve killed, it’s always, _always_ personal.”

“That’s why you’re not cut out to be an assassin,” Five spits.

Lila only glares at him, shooting him a look that oozes venom.

“Did it ever give you pause?” she asks.

Five’s brow twists. “No.” 

And he stares at her, remembering that photo. Those same dark eyes rendered in grayscale had been peering out at him from under a bed; that girl she’d been must have been plucked up by the Handler so soon after the assassination, a job that had simply never made _sense_ to him. The report had been uncharacteristically vague as to what event he was assisting in creating, and he’d been quick to shove it aside, to take the memory of it and cram it into the darkest recesses of his brain...

But now. Now, seeing Lila in front of him, seeing what she can do…

He knows exactly why her parents had been ordered dead. He knows exactly why she landed in the Commission’s arms right afterwards. He knows exactly why she’d been the crown jewel of the Handler’s trophy case.

“She ordered it. Your mother. She ordered that your parents be killed, because she wanted you for herself.”

Lila huffs, staring at him in disbelief. 

_The gall,_ she thinks lividly. 

Then, she throws herself at him.

He’s quick, but she’s quick too, and he’s tired, more tired than she is after the jumping he’s done. And, the butter knife he’s stabbing at her with hurts when he jabs at her belly, but it’s hardly sharp enough to cut her deeply with.

But hers is; she lands a hit, slicing through the leathery fabric of his uniform and ripping a bright red line across his arm.

Five cries out, and she hooks her foot around his ankle, wrenching it up to bash his forehead with the butt of her knife as he falls, crashing into a table, the fine crystal and china shattering around him. He’s rolling already, but she has the tablecloth in her hands, ripping him straight to the floor, where she lands a lucky kick at his head.

He’s stunned at her feet, blinking quickly and coughing up a sticky blob of phlegm. He keeps telling himself to get up, but he can't, the room's spinning too much, and his arms and legs pitch under him.

Lila peers over him, practically drunk on her own victory. She takes her heavy boot, and places it gently on his neck. Applies pressure, and releases it, listening to the way he's wheezing. 

Then, a pair of strong arms close around her neck and torso, wrenching her back and squeezing her in a tight grip.

She knows who it is by the feeling she gets, the prickle in her blood that lets her know that she has another power to choose from, if she so desires it.

Not that she does, of course.

There’s something else she’d rather do. 

Lila reaches up, and digs her thumb into the wound she’d given Diego days ago, when they were fighting in the wreckage of the Commission. She can’t get into the flesh, the way she’d like to, given that it’s under his uniform, but the skin is still tender enough to make him cry out, and lose his grip on her.

She shoulders him away, but he snatches the collar of her bomber jacket, tugging her back with him. Lila’s heels lose traction on the smooth floor, and she skids backwards, arms flying up. 

She’s feeling behind her for something, and Diego realizes it too late, when she tugs a knife from its place in his harness, and stabs blindly behind her.

There’s a blur of bright red agony, and Diego cries out, his grip going slack. She slips away from him, but he doesn’t even notice. He’s too busy clapping a hand over his face, which is slick with blood, pouring from his eye. 

Lila whips around, and drives her knee up into his abdomen.

Diego folds, dropping to the floor. He lands on his knees, trying to blink the blood out of his face, but he can’t, there’s just so much of it, it’s drenched his hands and his sleeves, trickling down in frighteningly large red globs on the smooth floor. 

Lila spits on the floor, coughing a bit, but she rounds on him, unzipping her jacket so she might breathe a bit easier. She can’t catch her breath, no matter how hard she tries, and the shallow wounds Five had inflicted on her may not be strong enough to kill her, but they sting _so much._

Lila snatches a loose knife from where it’d fallen on the floor, and is whirling it between her fingers, when the doors to the ballroom fly open. 

She turns, and immediately feels her heart drop into her throat. 

It’s the rest of the family. The cavalry has come, and they’re coming straight for her.

She evaluates, quickly. 

The strong one, Luther, she can take. Probably. 

The skinny one, Klaus, has a power that is utterly useless. Honestly, talking to ghosts? Who cares. She could take him with her eyes closed. She won't need to worry about him.

The one with the scar… she doesn’t recall his name, no, that’s… Ben? Ben. The one with the monsters. A wonderfully dramatic power, but one that can reach her from a distance. One she isn’t sure if she wants to risk trying on, especially not now that he’s barreling towards her.

Vanya. The atomic bomb herself, skidding down to kneel beside her twitching, fallen brothers, such a _waste_ of such incredible, destructive power... 

Allison. The one she needs to watch out for. The one who’s opening her mouth, crying out that she **heard a rumor that--**

Lila doesn’t take any chances. She seizes up that last drop of power within her, and flashes away, landing halfway down the hall behind them. 

There are too many of them, is the thing. Too many people to keep track of, too many ferocious figures racing towards her all at once. Too many powers in the same place, mixing together and mottling, overlapping and blurring, one into the next, making her head pitch and pound like a war drum from the sheer overload. There's so _much_ power but so _little_ time to sort through it all and determine which is which; she cannot flick through them, one at a time, as a person might spin the chambers of a revolver, if they're all so entwined that she can't tell them apart yet. Lila can only mimic one of them at a time, is only one versus five, and as strong as she is, she is still only an individual, facing off against a collective. She is a match to any one of them, but all together, she cannot compete.

Lila turns tail, and runs, hating herself more and more with every long stride she takes away from them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun fact: Lacus Oblivionis is a real place on the dark side of the Moon! When I read about it, my first thought was 'fuck that parallel dimension, the Hotel's going here.' It's simply too perfect.
> 
> Fun fact 2: MM, Clarissa and Oscar are from the comics.


	5. before all hell breaks loose

They’re back in the office.

Luther’s around the corner, fiddling with the control panel to the televator. Having reunited, they can now leave. They cannot break the walls or the windows, and even if they do, they’ll be sucked out into the vacuum of space. This is the simplest way out, and therefore their best option. 

He is fairly confident that if he can rewire a fried oxygen recycler with a fishbowl for a helmet that’s half-empty of air, he can figure this out too, and he’s making a great deal of progress. 

Everyone else is gathered around a dusty first aid kit that Klaus had dug up in his rifling of the cabinets. The antiseptic seems to have expired fifteen years ago, but beggars can’t be choosers, so he decides to use it anyway.

Everyone is banged up and bruised to some extent, but none worse than Diego, who’s propped himself up against a rusting file cabinet, his legs dangling over the desk he’s sitting on. He’s breathing fast and sharp, as if he’d resurfaced from a long, deep dive in the ocean. He’s also being positively unhelpful as a patient, snarling at Vanya when she’d approached him with a bandage, even though it’s her shirt sleeve that’s currently wadded up over his eye.

Really, it’s like he wants the damn thing to roll out and plop into his lap.

Or maybe it won’t roll exactly, given that it’s taken on the consistency of jelly that’d been mutilated by the spoon of a vengeful toddler. Klaus had been the only one of them to get close enough to start dabbing at it, but when Diego had peeled the sleeve away from his face and he’d really seen what he was about to work on, Klaus had swung back as if he’d stuck a fork in an electric socket, walked a full circle around the room with his face in his hands, and tugged Ben in to finish mother henning.

“You’re back?”

“Yeah, I just needed a minute. You know, to process.”

“Right. You want to take another look?”

“Actually, Diego, you can go ahead and keep that on there.”

He tugs at Ben’s elbow, which he has not let go of yet.

They’re very close, in a way they hadn’t been when they’d last seen each other. Diego has seen enough of his siblings in the past few weeks to know what that contact implies, and he’s fine with it, he is, he really, _really_ is. 

So he doesn’t totally get why there’s a hollowness in his chest, like something had been living there, and had suddenly escaped.

Anyway. 

Lila might’ve torn at one of his tear ducts too, judging by how his injured eye is shedding tears, but not his intact one. The salt’s mixing with the wound and _man,_ he hates this.

“Here,” Klaus says, “What do _you_ think?”

“Am I gonna lose it?” Diego asks tensely.

Ben purses his lips. “We’ll see.”

Great. Fantastic. He sure does _love_ that.

Ben hovers in front of his face, as he takes a look at his eye, and Diego feels his breath catch, just a bit. It’s still so strange, having him here with them, seeing him as their age, rather than the perpetual seventeen-year-old that lived so vibrantly in his memories. 

_It’s worth it,_ he thinks then. _All of this change is worth it, because you’re here with us. You’re alive again, and everything else is irrelevant._

He looks down, into his hand, at the crumpled photo he’d plucked off the floor of the ballroom, right before his family had dragged him away to safety.

Lila had dropped it, he’s pretty sure. Maybe in the midst of their fight, 

It seems to be a photo of her, of a small girl with dark, solemn eyes. On the back is a strange collection of numbers and letters that means absolutely nothing to him, but might mean something to Five.

Lila will be back, he’s sure, and she won’t stop until she kills them all. But he doesn’t feel furious at her, even for marring his eye like this; instead, he’s _curious._ He still doesn’t know where her power had come from, or how on earth she’d appeared out of thin air, a sudden contradiction to their father's teachings about how the six-technically-seven of them had been the only ones of their like in the entire world. Maybe there’s something about Lila that Five knows, something that might help them better understand her. 

Diego resolves to ask him later, once he glances across the room and sees him engaged in a hushed conversation with Vanya, who had just finished inhaling all the candies Five had saved for her. 

Across the room, Vanya is fretting about all the old prisoners they’d sent here, that the other version of her had had a hand in sending here. It bothers her deeply, that she could have done so much and have no memory of it at all. And what’s more...

“Do you think that Leonard would’ve been sent here, if…” 

_If I hadn’t killed him._

“Harold,” Five corrects her.

“Leonard,” she insists firmly. “He changed his name to Leonard. That’s what I’m calling him.”

Five, fighting off one hell of a concussion, doesn’t push it. He doesn’t get why she’s clinging to a name so tightly, but…

Well. He supposes he does. It’s a thing all of them do, all of them but Five. It’s why they’d been so hungry to accept the names Grace had chosen for them; they understood the value of a name, of what it meant for a person’s identity. Five had never really seen a point, as he had known exactly who he was by the time they’d been handed out in the short span of time before the Academy had debuted, and he’d seen no reason to pretend otherwise. He was Five, and he was going to stay Five, and his little rebellion would come in the form of taking what he’d been given and making it all his.

But he’ll indulge her. Even with something like this. So he nods stiffly, and that is the end of it. 

“...I don’t think they were attacking us,” Klaus is saying, loud enough to catch their attention, “I think they were just running for the televator.”

“Some of them were _definitely_ attacking us,” Diego counters.

“Okay, fine, _some_ of them were...”

There’s a buzz from the end of the hall, and Luther whoops.

The walls shudder and hum with a supernatural sort of electricity, one that makes their hair prickle, just for a second, and the Hargreeves siblings glance around, each to each, and feel Luther’s elation catching. The televator is on its way back, and they are coming home.

Unbeknownst to any of them, it was assumed, by Sir Reginald, upon creating the Hotel, that someday, somehow, someone might slip into the staff office, and crack the necessary configuration to summon the televator without proper clearance. So, he’d built in a failsafe, a silent alarm that would alert himself and his head of security of such a concern.

In short, the Scientific Man, for the first time in years, feels an urgent buzzing from the small alarm built into his utility built, and he knows implicitly what it means.

He sweeps his cape of liquid gold over his shoulders, shakes the moondust from his legs, and tears a bright slice through space itself, passing seamlessly into the Hotel’s lobby. He had been engineered for this very purpose, and now he finally gets to enact it.

The tear into space becomes volatile and alive, ripping vulnerable rugs and lamps and curtains from where they’d stood and sucking them out into the plain gray lunar desert. 

It also has the added effect of knocking down the entirety of the Umbrella Academy, save Luther, who had enough experience with gravitational anomalies to know how to slide down into a crouch and dig his hands into the floor. His siblings slide unsteadily across the lobby, snatching at each other and yelling in a panic, and while Five throws his arms out to touch as many of his siblings as he can, blinking Vanya, Klaus, Ben and Diego to safety behind the heavy front desk, which is rooted to the floor, Allison is not so lucky. 

She feels her heels leave the floor, then her toes, and dives to snatch the handle of a closet door, but it comes off in her hand. 

Then, she catches Luther around the arm, and he tugs her down to him, to wait until the slice of void that had appeared in the lobby closes.

The tear closes. It had only been open for ten seconds, but it’d already caused a hurricane’s worth of damage, which the Hotel sets about regrowing. Allison stares behind her, at the closet door, and gapes as she watches a new doorknob sprout like a mushroom from the deep brown wood. “I hate it here,” she says, to no one in particular.

Then, she slowly drags her gaze across the lobby, to the man she realizes had emerged through it.

He’s tall, nearly as tall as Luther, and well-muscled, with a cape that floats strangely around him, drawing attention to the way that he is simply not touching the ground at all; he’s hovering, his toes pointed down like a ballerina’s. The man is glowing from within, the blue paths of his veins shining bright as threads of lightning under his translucent skin. He’s so terrifyingly bright that it makes her eyes tear up, just to look at him, and tracing over his skin is a field of electrical energy so intense that their hair’s standing on end. 

“Hey Klaus, is _that_ God?” Ben whispers.

“No,” Klaus says, “No, I told you, Ben, God’s a little girl. I think?”

“What?” hiss Five and Diego, out of unison.

Vanya recognizes the shape of his smooth bald head, and she draws in a sharp breath. “That’s the Scientific Man.”

“The _who?”_ Klaus asks.

Diego recalls what he’d read in the old employee manual, and he curses. “He’s here for us.”

“... Man is a disease… ” the Scientific Man booms, launching into a rather cliched soliloquy about how he had transcended humanity entirely, becoming an entity far superior, the closest thing a person could get to godhood. 

“Great,” Ben mutters, “He’s a nihilist too.”

Ahead of them, Luther rises to his feet.

Then, the man moves, flowing like liquid as he sweeps down, curls his hand into a fist, and sends Luther skidding across the floor, blood bursting from his mouth. He stays down, groaning, bringing his hands up to cradle his head. Five and Klaus are upon him in an instant, dragging him to safety.

Allison stares up at him, enraged, and cries out: **“I heard a rumor that you left us alone.”**

And it doesn’t work.

The man’s eyes do not turn to milky glass, he does not turn away and float down the hall.

He simply stares at her, and that old familiar horror seizes hold of Allison’s heart and squeezes it to a pulp; she’s helpless again, and she has no idea why.

The Scientific Man turns, radiating solar energy, and he fixes his dull, coin-like eyes at the group of them, huddled against the wall. 

“What do we do?” Klaus asks. “Guys, what do we do? How do we get rid of this guy?”

Five screws his face up in concentration, but he can’t figure it out; _we jump, and he’ll catch us, but no, we can’t jump; I’m concussed and I might lose track of us all… We fight, and he’ll win, we run, but there’s nowhere to run in Hotel Oblivion, not for long..._

“Vanya,” Luther says, through a mouthful of blood.

She turns. 

He’s propped up against the wall, next to her violin case, his head lolling; she’s pretty certain that he’s concussed.

He has her violin and bow in his hands, and he’s holding them out to her. 

She stares at them. Her hands are shaking, already outstretched towards them, as if they had minds of their own.

The last time she’d had this instrument in her hands, the last time she’d used it, she’d killed the world. Her power is so great, too great, too unwieldy. She hasn’t figured out how to be precise without considerable effort and even more considerable luck, and is liable to tear the world in half with a percussive outburst.

But her violin is her lightning rod. She can generate her own power, can control how much of it she releases, and what shape it takes.

 _Yes,_ she thinks, _I can do this._

She accepts the violin, lifts it up to her chin, and rolls her shoulders back. 

“Get behind me,” she says, and her brothers fall into line.

Vanya draws her bow across her strings, and the world falls away. She can feel her power rumbling in her, hungry to be used, and she indulges it, making for it a shrill shiver of her strings as she saws the bow back and forth across it as quickly as she is able, a humming, buzzing beelike sound that crackles like lightning in the air. She doesn’t bother with a melody, just winds her power up and up and up, feeling cold fire lick on the inside of her skin the longer she holds it in, but she has to; she has to keep it coiled as long as she can...

The Scientific Man turns to her.

Vanya goes still. 

And with the strength of a single note, she shears him in half.

The man swings apart slowly, as though his spine were hinged, and he crumples across the floor, completely bloodless. 

Allison’s eyes have gone large and owlish, and she stares at Vanya, who lowers her bow, shaking. Her fingers are stinging from the strings; she’s never gone this long without practicing. 

An apology is fresh on her lips, but Allison lurches for her, tackling her in a tight embrace, and Vanya sighs in relief, all the tension flooding from her at once.

* * *

The world has stopped spinning, and Luther is most certainly concussed, but he is of sound enough mind to check the televator switch to ensure that nothing had fallen out of place.

He flicks the brass panel back, runs a finger along the tangle of tiny multicolored wires, and nods in approval at the knot he’d tied them in, the one that had been needed to summon their ride home back to them. It’s intact, and will stay intact. They’ll be able to come home.

He stares at it for a moment longer, reconsidering, thinking of what he’s seen in his short time at Hotel Oblivion, of all the things he hasn’t seen, but must be happening just out of sight.

He decides. And he makes a few adjustments, improving the televator's memory just enough to suit the purpose he's decided for it. His hands are shaking the entire time, and there’s a pit in his gut, but it has to be done. This can't keep happening. 

He turns to leave, to head for the rest of the family, who are gathered around the televator, holding it for him.

But the phone is ringing. It’s a line that’s meant to be exclusive to the Hotel, and none of the rooms’ phones are capable of dialing anywhere. So whoever it is has to be calling from somewhere else.

Luther picks it up, knowing exactly who it must be before he hears the aged snarl buzzing on the other end.

“Hi Dad.”

“Number One, I expect a very good explanation as to why on earth you and your teammates have taken an unapproved, unchaperoned visit to Hotel Oblivion without cause nor my express--”

“Dad, we’re here for Vanya.”

His father takes a moment to respond. Luther imagines him sitting in his hotel room, staring at the wall, his eyes bugging out of their sockets the way they always tend to do when he’s heard something particularly egregious.

“I’ve made a mistake,” he says quietly. “I never should have let you stay, after your accident.”

Luther grits his teeth. The scabbed-over gouges in his chest and back and torso are aching. He wants to ask him about the Hotel, about everything he’s seen, but he knows better than to expect a straight answer, let alone a truthful one. 

“I knew you were weak, I _always_ knew you were weak, so it didn’t surprise me at all that you required three years to recover, and even then emerged so repugnant--”

His vision turns red, and the pounding in the back of his skull isn’t the concussion.

“But I found myself persuaded by sentiment to allow you to remain, rather to send you somewhere I might not have to be reminded of your failures. You had a team to lead, after all. I believed, foolishly, that you might learn from your mistake, that you might be humbled. It seems I was wrong. You’ve only let your weakness consume you. You allowed Number Seven to--”

“Vanya.”

 _“Number Seven_ to fall out of hand, and now you’ve gone so far as to go retrieving her. I once saw value in your idealism, but now I understand that your naivete has been idiocy all along. You of all people ought to know that she isn’t worth the trouble.”

Anger burns in Luther like a chemical fire.

“You’re a monster.”

There’s silence from the other line.

“I am many things. And in this I am content.”

Luther hangs up. 

Ends-justify-the-means, his _ass._

He leaves the office, and doesn’t look back.

His family is waiting for him, right where he’d left them in the lobby. There’s a Hotel guest here too, a thin man built like a bird, staring at the lot of them suspiciously. He retreats when he sees Luther’s immense shadow stealing down the hallway, scurrying backwards into the lobby. 

When his family looks at him questioningly, asking whether they are well and truly ready to go with their eyes, he nods. 

A ripple of relief rolls through them, and they file into the televator, one by one. The Academy packs in, elbow to elbow, shoulder to shoulder, chest to back, and the old thing groans under their combined weight, but it does not break.

The man creeps towards them, once they’ve all entered, Luther last of all, and he comes to a stop just in front of the door as Luther tugs the cage closed, and punches in the code that leads home for the last time the televator will need to be reminded of it.

“Next one’s you,” Luther says to the man.

The man stares at him, wide-eyed. “What?”

The televator begins to descend.

“It’s coming back. It’ll be back as long as you need it to. You’re free to go. Let everyone know, alright?” 

The last thing he sees of the man is a slight nod. 

Behind him, his siblings rustle with movement. They are looking around at each other, staring in surprise, but not disagreement. Luther of all people, having suffered so similar an imprisonment, seems to understand what must be done here the best, and so they will trust his judgment, come what may. 

Then, with a gut-clenching _lurch,_ the televator begins to drop, rattling and ricketing as it does. One of Allison’s braids flies up from the force, and thwacks Diego in his good eye, and he grunts. Vanya steps forward to stand beside Luther, and she loops an arm around Luther’s waist, leaning in gently to hang onto him, not at all for the purposes of balance.

They stare out at the darkness, blacker than black, threaded through with streaks of starlight, and the gravity of what Luther has done settles on him, but he doesn’t buckle at all under the weight of it. He regrets nothing. 

With a flash of dull, orange light, the televator _lurches_ to a stop.

And then they’re home.

* * *

They make a quick stop at the infirmary, to lick their wounds, and prevent Diego from any future gangrene, which will most certainly have been caused by having his eye bandaged by a filthy pajama sleeve and several messy layers of strips of translucent desk tape, of which Klaus and Ben had depreciated the entire office's supply.

Afterwards, the Hargreeves siblings had chosen not to linger within its walls any longer, given that they would be facing two separate shitstorms rolling in from two separate fronts: the surge of supervillains that roll up and out of the televator in waves that come every minute, and Hurricane Dad, currently barreling his way home from his meeting with unscrupulous government officials, upon realizing that his home was on television, and belching supervillains onto the streets.

In short, they relocated to Morrison Park. 

Having no clothes to change into, with the exception of a set of uniforms that everyone mutually agrees they will not be returning to, they’ve opted to remain in their mission suits, which, aside from being somewhat bloodstained, torn and otherwise stinky with sweat, are not exactly subtle.

They’re drawing quite a few stares, from the few denizens of the park on a fine weekday midmorning. 

And, to be fair, they’re staring back.

In this world they’ve landed in, much has changed. For one, the Umbrella Academy is seven strong and still intact. For another, there are telephones, the size of a brick, with an antenna, and people are walking around with them to their ears. And, most notably, Pogo doesn’t seem to be the only sentient chimpanzee in this world; Five, Vanya, Diego, Klaus and Ben are currently sitting on the grass of the Morrison Park soccer field, gaping openly at the sight of a group of sentient chimpanzees cycling their way down a bike path.

“My God,” Five’s muttering, “What the hell did we _do?”_

Vanya, who is staring at the ape family, recalling what she had done to her own formerly beloved monkey uncle only weeks ago, sniffles, and turns away, to further taint her prison pajamas with grass stains, as she curls up and screws her eyes shut.

It’s too bright. Her eyes are used to the constant twilight of Hotel Oblivion, and even though the sun’s only a faint white circle behind a heavy blanket of silver clouds, the light’s still too much. 

Five glances over, at the stone bench across the clearing where Allison and Luther have chosen to take a seat. Allison has draped her body over Luther’s, with an intimacy that he doesn’t recognize, one they must have learned while they were apart in Dallas. Luther’s hand reaches up to squeeze at her knee, and she skims a hand over his shoulder.

 _Or maybe it’s not them, and it’s their bodies,_ he wonders. _Maybe it’s muscle memory, something the other Allison and other Luther had done so easily._ After all, he’d noticed that glint of gold around Allison’s neck.

Allison brings up the deformed hand, turning it over, and Luther takes it between his pawish ones. Five imagines a conversation between them, in which Allison says, rather pleased, that they match. She strikes him as the sort of person who’d want to match outfits with their partner.

He sighs, and lays back on the grass. The world’s too confusing. He lets his thoughts wander like clouds, listening to Ben bemoan how their hasty departure from the currently-ruined mansion has ruined his ambitions of attaining his first hot shower and post-hot-shower-nap ("Which is _very_ different from a normal nap," Ben stresses) since his death.

The monotony to their conversation is… nice. It’s the first time they’ve relaxed in a while; for some of them, it’s been days, for others, weeks. The stillness is disconcerting, but, given what they’ve just survived, they deserve a moment of reprieve, to talk about things that don’t matter at all, to lie back and be lazy for a moment. Sure, there's a scattering of supervillain escapees currently streaming through the city in a panic, but he figures the best thing the Academy can do for them is simply leave them be, and let them find their way out themselves; he doesn't exactly think that they'll appreciate the help of their former jailers, and they have no obligation to. 

Their ease isn’t universal; Allison and Luther had stolen off in the first place because they both had individually decided that they did not want their demons to infect the others. And, apart from them, they might be able to discuss them freely without fear of causing a panic among the rest of their family.

Allison pulls away from Luther, rising slowly to her feet and walking in a wide circle around the small plaza they’re in. It’s odd, in a way she can’t pinpoint, like a bell ringing in the back of her mind, a deja vu of sorts; she gets the sense that she had been in this very place before, that she had been here with Luther in a dream or another life.

She thinks again, about the intricacies of time travel; perhaps she had. Perhaps this Allison whose body she’s stolen had brought this Luther here, perhaps she herself had been here in the world that doesn’t exist anymore and she can’t remember it. 

_If we can’t tell if it’s real,_ she wonders, _does it matter?_

Luther, staring at the space she’d left beside him, then around at the exact configuration of trees flanking them, is thinking something similar. This place is familiar to him, this seat he’s in is familiar to him, and he doesn’t understand how.

He sighs, kneading his forehead with the heel of his hand, and Allison has completed her circle, and is standing before him, so he rises to meet her. 

They’ve been gone for only a few hours, and yet somehow, it feels as though they’ve lost years of their lives. The Hotel had carved into them both and left scars that are deep and fresh and stinging under the blast of cool, wet wind blowing in from the east. It plucks up one of Allison’s many flyaway curls, and she bats it away from her face in annoyance. 

“I wasted my life,” Luther says. “I can’t believe I was that stupid, in believing Dad for as long as I did.”

 _“I_ can’t believe you let everyone go. Real big mess you’ve made.”

Luther smiles dryly. The flames of his seething anger that had taken hold of him have died down, and now he’s left with only scorch marks. Even so, “I had to. I don’t regret it.”

“I’m not saying you should. In truth, I’m impressed.” 

“Really?”

“I am,” Allison answers honestly. But there’s still a heavy weight on her shoulders.

Hotel Oblivion had been an incredible ordeal, and in the midst of it, she had little room to think of anything other than survival. She was to find Vanya, find the rest of their family, and find their way out. And now that she’s done that, the veil over her own grief has been ripped away, and the hideousness of the wound it’s carved in her is exposed. 

It’s so much. It’s so much, and she doesn’t quite know what to do with it. 

She knows that time heals many things. Not all of them, but enough of them. It was going to heal the rift between her and Claire, a rift that will never be closed, that has expanded by such an impassable distance that she can’t even ask Klaus to conjure up her child so she might talk to her (after all, how can a medium call upon the spirit of a person who had never existed?). It had brought her and Luther together before, and it will again. 

But for now…

Allison reaches up, with trembling fingers, and tugs on the thin golden chain around her neck. She is looking forward to this in the same way she might anticipate a root canal; she hates it, but it must be done, if the pain’s going to stop.

“I know that you blame yourself,” she says, “For what happened with…”

“With Claire.”

“Yeah.”

“Well,” she says, “I don’t. I need you to know that.”

Luther’s solemn face twists in confusion.

Allison sighs. “It would be too easy,” she says, “Too simple. Sure, it was _your_ plan, but she’s _my_ baby. She was always _my_ choice. Not yours, not Five’s, not Dad’s. None of you made her; _I_ did. So her not being here? That’s all me. You want to carry that weight, and I think it’s sweet that you do, that you want to spare me of it, but you can’t. Only I can.”

She swallows, and blinks quickly, to keep her tears from spilling out. This horrible wound in her is keening, and she doesn’t know how she’s going to heal it. But she does know that this is a pain she needs to feel, a pain she needs to get to know, so she might find a way back from it, and she needs to spend time with it.

Allison also knows that when she’s hurting, she gets mean, she gets vicious, she drags people down to feel as terrible as she does. And she can’t do that to him. She can’t do that to _them._

“And I need to carry it alone for a while.”

Allison tugs the chain up, and picks at the clasp with the blunt edge of her nail, gently removing the locket from her neck. The charm feels so heavy in her hands.

She takes it, and reaches for Luther’s enormous leathery hand, bringing his palm up to face her, and carefully setting the necklace into it, winding the thin gold chain in a spiral around the little heart.

What she’s doing has a weight to it, and Luther feels it acutely; she doesn’t have to be a telepath to know that he’s thinking of the last time Allison had taken this off, and she is as well. She can feel his pulse jumping in his wrist, can only imagine the fear flashing through his mind like a lightning strike, the fear that she doesn’t want him, that she’s had enough of him, that she’s closing the door again and will never walk back through it.

She’s not.

“I’m not returning it,” Allison says, careful to make sure he understands. “I want you to know that. We aren’t over, not at all. I am only asking you to hold onto it for me, because I intend to come back for it, but only when I’m ready. Alright?”

Luther looks her in the eyes, long and deep.

Then he nods slowly.

Allison leans up, to nudge her forehead against his, to draw her scratched palms down across his face to cup his cheeks, and she kisses him. 

It’s slow, and careful and she is using it to seal a promise; she is not saying goodbye, and she will be back for him when she is ready.

She is the one to break it, and Luther dips his head after hers, just slightly. Allison smiles a little in spite of herself. She nuzzles her forehead against his, and his warm hands fold gently around her back. 

“I love you,” she says, feeling her heart tremble at the way his face softens.

“I love you too.”

How nice it would be, just to stay like this. How nice it would be, to stay together, and never talk about her daughter again, and pretend that doing so wouldn’t eat a hole through this wonderful thing they are starting to have together.

Allison goes still, leaning into his broad, warm chest for a minute longer.

But then he pulls back, slowly, gently, to let her get used to his leaving. 

She stares up at him. _Tell me what to do,_ she thinks. _Tell me where we’re going from here. Take me and point me in a direction and fire me, and I will be ready and willing, just don’t let me stand here and think about what I’m about to do, or I won’t be able to do it._

“Alright,” he says. “Let’s get back to the others.”

They hold hands the entire way back, but when they reach their family, they let them fall apart. Just for now.

* * *

Lila separated herself from the Umbrella Academy, running far and fast, dragging the bubble of influence she’d cast around her with her, until they weren’t even a flicker at the edge of her consciousness.

But even then, though she was powerless, she was not free of them.

These powers that she’d soaked up are so volatile and alive within her, all jockeying to be her choice, all scattering in her mind and fragmenting apart when she tries to reach in and look at them. Mother had never prepared her for this; she grew up knowing exactly what she was and what she could do, but she’d never been taught _how._

And now, she’s paying for her mother’s oversights. 

When she’d reached out and reeled in their powers she’d gotten something else as well something more than she’d intended. Lila, upon ceasing her panicked sprint into the depths of the hotel, had, for a few terrifying seconds, found herself a stranger to her own thoughts; strangely, they had seemed to be rolling around her head in a language she did not speak, a language that her mother had somehow neglected to tell her. 

They’d returned to her, but she’d been left haunted by the memory of the ordeal, of finding herself a stranger inside her own mind, lost to the jamble of seven voices that were not her own, that were warring inside her skull, bouncing off the bone over and over, each stream of thought growing fainter and fainter until it was only _noise._

It made her angry, so angry she’d beaten her knuckles black and bloody into a wall that had smugly repaired itself, wiping the blood from its tidy purple paint job. It had become perfect again, and left her bleeding, her fingers twitching with bright bursts of pain.

And for a while, there had been nothing. There had been Lila, lurking in the halls, pacing anxiously, wondering how on earth she’s meant to go about this path she’s committed herself to. She is unpracticed in these powers, and there’s simply no way she can _become_ practiced in them, as they are dependent on proximity, and proximity is a luxury she cannot be afforded, now that the entire Hargreeves clan has turned upon her. 

It’d been an awful predicament she’d found herself in, but Lila had been afforded little time to consider it.

There had come the explosion of chaos, which she was certain that the Academy was the heart and cause of, which she had opted to simply sit on the sidelines of, in order to wait out the storm.

And soon enough it had passed, the roar of noise, the shiver of volatile living music that crawled into her brain and made it shake from the inside out, like it was about to liquify and come pouring out her nose and ears.

But even then, there was no peace.

Lila had watched, in shock, as a ripple of change surged through the Hotel, as doors were knocked upon, throngs of people came bursting in from stairwells and elevators, trickling up from the basement and down from the penthouses. She’d readied herself for a fight, but they seemed utterly unconcerned with her, streaming right past her, as though they were a river and she a troublesome rock in the middle of them all.

Her curiosity piqued, she had decided to fall into a comfortable old habit, one that had always protected her before. 

She played along.

She fed herself into the crowd and let it carry her through its currents, until she had emerged into the lobby.

And realized that the televator that had vanished behind her upon her arrival is back. That it _kept coming back._ That the denizens of the Hotel were climbing over ruined furniture and pressing themselves into a long, squabbling line, as they were mounting an enormous, yet somehow tedious, escape.

Lila, recognizing her way out when she saw it, had decided upon taking it.

It was clear that the Hargreeves siblings were no longer here, and therefore, she had no reason to be as well.

So, she squeezed in alongside a floating bust of some dead president, a man with a glittery skull for a head, and a trio of uncomfortably tense-looking nurses, and she had ridden the televator back from wherever it was that Hotel Oblivion was.

And now, the cage creaks open, and she emerges to chaos. 

The escapees are fleeing the Hargreeves house, scattering like roaches through its halls and breaking out of each and every window, in their quest to put as much space between themselves and the mansion as possible.

Lila walks out leisurely through the gap that had been left when the front doors had been blown off by something she’s guessing is a fire blast. 

She decides immediately that there’s simply no way the Academy would stick around and allow the destruction of their home; they’re far too cowardly for that.

So, Lila ambles along the street, watching casually as the crowds start pouring away from the house, realizing exactly who’s ripping through the streets in a panic, threading through their midst; oh, it really is _so_ funny.

She doesn’t contemplate for a moment whether she should join them and start some sort of tribe of ex-Hotel guests in the mountains somewhere. Rather, the idea makes her scoff a little.

Lila had been raised by her mother to thrive on her own, to value her independence fiercely. She’d never had a partner on any of her assignments, and was better off for it. Unlike the Academy, she had never been shoved into a tight box, dressed like her peers, and labeled with a number. Unlike the Academy, she is an _individual._

But her power, in some horrible stroke of irony, will never allow her to stay that way. Her power isn’t even _hers,_ if she’s honest (which, now and then, she is), because the only time she gets to have it is when she is reaching in with sneaky fingers and plucking up a piece of someone _else’s._

 _Maybe that’s why Mother never let me learn,_ Lila concludes. _She was sparing me that horrible pain of knowing that I’d never have any power that was really my own._

She hates them for it. She _hates_ them, for dangling that glimmer of extraordinariness in front of her only to tear it away. She hates them, for taking everything from her and not even having the gall to take the same amount of interest in this death spiral she’s determined to drag them into as she is. 

She takes her hate and cultivates it, letting it simmer in her as she wanders through Midtown, wondering where they could have gone, and how on earth she’s meant to take them down on her own.

“--unidentified super-humans have arrived on the scene--”

Lila whips her head around.

The sound is coming from a passing store with a wall of boxy televisions flashing in the display window. 

Lila presses her forehead to the smudged glass, and peers in. 

They’re all turned to the same dull news station, but the breaking news is _not_ dull. 

No, it’s the _opposite_ of that. 

Lila watches the masked, brightly-costumed figures flashing into being on a dozen screens, and her jaw drops; oh, she's practically _salivating,_ she's so excited.

It’s _exactly_ who she realizes she's been looking for.

* * *

Those few wonderful occasions when the Hargreeves siblings had all gotten along wonderfully had all taken place in the warm sugar-streaked window booth at Griddy’s Doughnuts, a place that has taken on a sort of sacredness to the seven of them.

It had started when they were eleven. In those months leading up to the Academy’s debut, the children had felt the pressure digging into them so intensely that even Luther had seen it necessary for the lot of them to blow off some steam.

So, they’d gone climbing through the fire escape in Five’s bedroom, had descended three stories, leapt down into the alley, and crept out clinging to each other. That first night the seven of them had gone wandering down the street unattended had been frightening and exhilarating, and their discovery of the squat diner only a few blocks away had been wondrous; ordinary children dream of discovering secret passages hidden behind bookcases in their homes, but extraordinary children dream of finding greasy diners to get away from such passages.

That first night, their dream had come true, and they’d sought to repeat it as much as possible.

They’d crash through the doors in the dead of night, making a grand show of entering from different directions on the street, as though they’d all come from separate houses and apartments. They’d eat until they made themselves sick, and pretended the uniforms they wore were for a private school they’d attended. They pretended that they were ordinary, and being that they believed Vanya was ordinary at the time, they finally had a reason to embrace her wholeheartedly.

Now, they are repeating the ritual.

It isn’t the same, of course. 

This time, the seven of them are adults, are clad in soiled mission uniforms, are making up no lies about being out for a night of fun with school chums. 

This time, they know all too well that Vanya isn’t ordinary at all.

This time, they are visiting the diner in broad daylight.

Griddy’s doesn’t have the same cozy ambiance as it does just after one in the morning, as it does during the peak of the lunch rush. 

A lunch rush, Five notes sourly, that doesn’t seem to have manifested itself; they are the only people in the restaurant, save a waitress who scurried behind the counter upon seeing them, and, if he had to guess, out the back door to take a smoke break. 

But he doesn’t mind at all; they have their pick of the seats, and had chosen their old one, the very same window booth they’d once occupied as gangly preteens. They’d even been able to creep behind the counter and prepare their own orders, which Ben has taken to doing, flitting back and forth from between their table and the coffeemaker. The novelty of doing inane things, it seems, hasn’t worn off for him yet (Privately, Five hopes it won’t just yet, as he waves his cup for a refill and studiously avoids looking too hard at the smear of sugar on Vanya’s lower lip).

The remaining six of them sit, crowded into the booth, each half in the lap of the next of them, with Luther and Diego packed in and squished against the window, but they’re not too perturbed by the closeness. They’d endured a road trip from hell, and a road trip to hell, and they’re too preoccupied with inhaling as much of the Griddy’s menu as possible while ignoring the question of why, exactly, Allison’s locket is wrapped around Luther’s wrist, to complain. 

(And besides, he’s quite content to have Vanya’s thigh pressed up against his own, as he’s sure Diego is with Klaus.)

But despite himself, Five can’t relax.

Something’s… off.

That waitress isn’t coming back, and in fact, looking out the window, there don’t seem to be a lot of people out on the street. 

Ben’s taking too long to come back with his coffee.

Five cranes his neck around Vanya, to look for him, and spots him in the far corner of the diner, staring at the little television mounted from the ceiling. It’s playing the news silently, as it usually does, as it had when he’d last been here a few weeks ago, in another world.

“Hey,” Ben says. “Is that _us?”_

Five blinks out from where he’s sandwiched between Vanya and Luther, and to his side, his chocolate-covered custard doughnut still in his hands. 

Behind them, the conversation halts. Their family can tell that something’s happening.

Five stares at the fuzzy image, at a photo of Luther, Diego, Allison, Klaus, Ben and Vanya all standing in a line, all with domino masks on, an image of the versions of them who they’d swept in and replaced.

“What…” Five mumbles around a mouthful of custard-filled-doughnut.

“What is it?” asks Vanya, from somewhere behind them, stepping carefully around where she'd left her violin case on the floor.

“Oh, shit,” Ben says, “We’re on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.”

“For _what?”_ snaps Allison.

“Probably for letting literally every supervillain we’ve ever fought who’s still alive loose in the city,” sighs Five, staring at the grainy news footage of a pack of brightly-costumed, unnaturally gaunt people hijacking a van. He doesn't know whether they're stealing it to sell, or to drive out of the city, and he truly does not care.

“I blame Luther,” pipes Diego. There’s a _thwack._ “I’m _just_ kidding, Allison.”

“Hey," says Luther, "Isn’t that Griddy’s?”

It is. It is very clearly shaky helicopter footage of Griddy's Doughnuts that they are seeing on the television. 

Five glances around, and suddenly realizes why the diner is as empty as it is, why the waitress had vanished through the backdoor when she'd seen them come in.

“Wait,” says Ben. “Here.” He kicks up, onto a table, and gets his hands on the volume dial, cranking it up so the fuzzy sound of the news anchor fills the empty restaurant. 

“--six unidentified super-humans have arrived on the scene--” 

“Oh, real nice,” drawls Klaus, licking his fingers clean of jelly. “The T.V. lady forgot about Vanya too. See, it’s not just us.”

Very frosty silence.

“Too soon?”

“Hey,” Vanya steps forward, biting her lip in concentration. The unidentified super-humans in question have been displayed on the television, and... “That’s not us, is it?”

It isn't them. They are inside the restaurant, and the tiny, blurry people onscreen are outside of it, are _above_ it. There are six of them, not seven, and their uniforms are the wrong color, and they seem to be _flying_ and... 

Then, the window explodes, and there's no time to think about anything else.

* * *

The strange supper that Sir Reginald Hargreeves had shared with the specters of his future children in the spring of 1955 had stayed with him. He’d executed his future son’s request in including their deviant sister, in not sedating her (even though there’d been a time when she was quite young that he’d been within a hair’s width of doing it anyway), in maintaining her as a member of the Umbrella Academy. 

But he had felt that it would not be enough.

No, he had felt it important to give his grand experiment a control group, one that might serve as a contingency plan should something go terribly wrong. Perhaps, he'd concluded, that was where his future self had failed. 

Upon hearing his most loyal charge growling at him through the telephone, and upon realizing exactly _where_ he and his teammates were and exactly _what_ they were there to do, Reginald had decided, rather simply, that the last straw had been broken, and that it was time to cut his losses.

So, he put in a call to the local news station, declaring emphatically that his children had gone rogue, and had decided they would unleash chaos onto the city.

And then, he had put in a second call, long-distance to Europe, to summon the Sparrow Academy. 

See, Sir Reginald Hargreeves, like so many terrible fathers with far too much money and far too large an ego, had not found himself content with a single family.

So, he had decided to start a second one, a secret one.

When Sir Reginald had traversed the earth in search of those infamous spontaneous children, he’d decided to look a little harder than he had in the timeline that no longer exists. In _this_ timeline, he did not stop at collecting seven of them, but had brought the number of his acquisitions up to a lucky thirteen.

After recognizing those troublesome ghosts of his future mistakes in seven of them, but not the other six, he’d divided the lot accordingly, and set to raising them as he saw fit. 

Being Reginald Hargreeves, he had of course decided to take a hands-off approach with this second litter of children, leaving them in the care and keeping of a robot he had designed especially for the task as they trained for future use. He justified it, of course, as a variable with which to compare the two, but it was equally due to his own lack of interest in them. After all, they weren't the ones who'd lead to the end of the world; surely, they could be trusted to not need his steady hand. 

Being Reginald Hargreeves, he had of course decided not to tell his first pack of children about his second; it would only unfocus them, he had determined. But his second pack, no, they were far more competent; they could be trusted with the knowledge of their siblings, as they were to replace them should anything go wrong. (After all, his will has to divide up his estate amongst some of them, and he's certainly not going to bequeath his holdings to _both_ of them. He considers this unfortunate fiasco to be an indication on the part of the universe as to which of his children are truly worthy of his legacy)

And being Reginald Hargreeves, he had of course decided to deal with his loss of control over one family by siccing the other upon it.

Which is to say, on the twelfth hour of the thirteenth of April, 2019, the Umbrella Academy find themselves thrust into the center of a particularly violent family reunion. 

It doesn't go well.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So. As stated before, we're done with canon past this point. I expect nothing but to be let down, so I'm just going for it, using the scraps of canon we have to work with to try and continue and end the story on my own terms. This is just about the end of canon material, so I'm gonna be winging it from here. So a lot of what I'm about to write is probably about to be proved massively wrong as more UA material comes out. (Oh well?)
> 
> Thanks to everyone for reading!
> 
> ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
> 
> Coming up next: the most terrible of family reunions.


End file.
